ISRAEL - IRAN - SYRIA - HAMAS - HEZBOLLAH - WWWIII?

Israel did, as you say - seize the West bank for alleged security reasons, and then went on to deprive the people who lived there of basic human rights and the property they had owned for centuries. That is why Israel is a pariah state in the eyes of most people in the world.

I'm no fan of JTT, but how the hell do you "know" what he knows or doesn't know to be true? Do you read minds?

Alternatively you could just be blowing some more of the usual smoke to hide the emptiness of your assertions.

Infra, you must be slipping these days -- you are resorting to spamming.

You have made it clear on several occasions that you would love to see the demise of Israel. Certainly, that colors all your foolish statements.

Let us stipulate two facts

There is but a single nation that is a democracy in the Middle East; that nation is Israel

There is but a single nation that can be relied on to be consistently pro-Western in the Middle East; that nation is Israel

So why the need for President Obama to put pressure on Israel to freeze the building of new homes?, And why the need for our President to force Israel to make "peace" with the Palestinians, a peace that will only be a way-station on the road to another terrorist state in that part of the world, a peace that the Palestinians don’t want, a peace that will be anything but peaceful?

The Israelis are correctly resisting the suicidal implications behind any imposed arrangement. But why is the impulse to achieve a settlement that will in fact settle nothing, there in the first place?

Lee Smith has an interesting article in Tablet in which he correctly points out that the urgency surrounding the Palestinian issue has little to do with reality. The various Muslim states, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and Iran, need to find a way to accomplish two things; divert attention from their own autocratic behavior, and win over the West to support their non-democratic governments. They do this essentially by changing the subject. The problem, in their formulation, is not their own internal dysfunction, but rather it is the “Zionist entity”.

And persons like James Baker in the senior Bush administration, persons like Samantha Powers in the current Obama administration, Europeans like Tony Blair, nod their heads with sage understanding, convinced in their hearts that the problem is Israel and the “Zionist lobby”.

Many American foreign policy gurus and most European diplomats, who should know better, swallow the nonsense that if we can only solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem, all the other problems in the Middle East will magically disappear.

When the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, against New York and Washington occurred, Al Qaeda talking little about Israel. Once they realized what a public relations bonanza that could be, the attacks took on an anti-Israel tint.

Now we have a unique phenomenon. The Arab masses are rising up against their autocratic leaders.

And not one word about Israel.No one is claiming they are revolting over the “plight of the Palestinians”

It is hard to understand how the takeover of Lebanon by Syria, the killing of the Lebanese prime minister by Bashar Assad, the murder of 25,000 Syrians by Hafez Assad, the Iraq-Iran war, the genocide in the Sudan, or any of the dozens of other problems of the area, have anything to do with Israel .

And so the lie has been exposed.

Here is a reasonable question: will the Arabists of the State Department, or those like Samantha Powers who surround Barack Obama, change their tune? Not likely. Once stuck with an “explanation”, even the smartest people will tend to focus on those “facts” that support their theses, and ignore those realties that clash with their vision, so-called confirmation bias.

Smith points out that “The fact that a wave of revolutions has shaken the foundations of Arab politics without the slightest apparent connection to popular outrage against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians should be surprising to most experts and politicians in the West. For over four decades, the driving idea behind the West’s approach to the Middle East has been the supposed centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to Arab popular anger at the West and its key to ensuring the stability of the West’s favored regimes.”

Why is President Obama still pushing for a peace based on old ideas, still pushing for a settlement “freeze”? America should know better. Our government keeps going back to the Middle East with the same proposals, ideas that have never worked.

Why are these ideas stillborn? Because the Palestinians have rejected any recognition of a Jewish state, or any solution that does not contain within it the seeds for the destruction of Israel, and Israel has rejected suicide.

The result over the decades has been thousands of Israeli casualties resulting from terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, who are doing the dirty work of Syria, Iran and others, and thousands of Arabs killed when Israel responded.

As Lee points out, “ this is no “meaningless” cycle of violence; rather, it is the product of a deliberate diplomatic process overseen by the world’s oldest democracy. It was the United States that kept going back to the well over and over”

It's not that President Obama ignores the facts of the matter. It's that he doesn't know whether he's coming or going, and he's allowed a subject nation that enjoys heavy domestic support to dictate the terms of negotiations.

Advocate wrote:

We may debate the amount of land beyond the 1949 armistice lines that Resolution 242 entitles us to retain, but the discussion is over minor percentages. Besides, two prime ministers offered the Palestinians over 90 percent of these territories – and were rebuffed.

These Israeli Prime Ministers were rebuffed primarily because they refused to own Israel's obligation to the Palestinians in recognizing their Right of Return.

Netanyahu's idea of a two-state solution is for the Palestinians to have some sort of ghetto utterly at the mercy of and under the Zionist boot.

Advocate wrote:

In contrast, beyond making duplicitous statements – concealed from their constituents – endorsing peace, the Palestinian leaders remained utterly intransigent, unwilling to compromise on a single issue, even refusing to negotiate.

The Palestinian leaders agreed to meet with the Israelis all the while Israel continued to expand its settlements in Palestinian territory.

Advocate wrote:

In fact, following Al Jazeera disclosures of compromises allegedly reached during negotiations with prime minister Ehud Olmert, the PA leaders blatantly denied having offered any concessions.

Surely this suggests that when negotiating with Olmert, Abbas was either duplicitous or conscious that brainwashing his constituents to hate us had been so effective that any genuine Palestinian accommodation was inconceivable.

Actually, what these disclosures reveal is the lengths that the Palestinians were willing to go through to accommodate the Israelis, and yet the Israelis reneged on any kind of agreement.

All the PA officials were doing was trying to save face by denying the fact that they were willing to sell out their own peoples' principles.

Advocate wrote:

The incitement emanating from every level of Palestinian society continues unabated, with Abbas brazenly sanctifying terrorists and providing pensions for the families of those who murder Israeli civilians.

This isn't different from Israel's commemoration of its own terrorists.

Advocate wrote:

Many of us believe that the principal objective of Abbas, like his Hamas kinsmen, is still the dissolution of Jewish sovereignty; that he is merely employing Yasser Arafat’s tactics of extracting unilateral concessions and attempting to dismantle us in stages.

The principal objective of Abbas, and most of the Palestinian peoples for that matter, is that Israel comply with its legal obligations as determined by the UN, the very organization that Israel points to when it claims legitimacy as a nation, through the various resolutions that body has passed with respect to the Palestinian peoples.

Advocate wrote:

However, even if we accept your premise that Abbas is genuinely willing to make peace, can you, seriously visualize him having the power to deliver? Besides, you are aware that Hamas is a genocidal organization, committed to killing all Jews. Yet the man you insist is a moderate peace partner unequivocally repeats his desire to merge his PA with these Islamic psychopaths.

Where in the world does Leibler get the idea that Hamas is committed to killing all Jews?

Advocate wrote:

AND FINALLY, Mr. President, a word about our right to defend ourselves.

A necessarily discriminatory and oppressive ethnocentric state does not have the right to defend itself.

Advocate wrote:

If authorities in Cuba or Mexico authorized missile launches targeting American citizens, would you call for restraint? Would you respond by merely bombing empty buildings? Would you apologize if innocent civilians employed as human shields became casualties in the course of efforts to forestall attacks on American citizens?

If America were to be a necessarily discriminatory and oppressive state then America would deserve to be attacked from everywhere and everyone and dismantled and replaced with a democratic state.

Advocate wrote:

.....The culmination of all this was the massive attack by the Arab countries and the Pals on Israel in the '67 War. This justified Israel's seizure of the WB and Gaza as a prize of war and for security reasons. This should make you understand why Israel has to be very careful in its negotiations with the Pals over a separate state for the Pals.

A slip of fact there. The "massive attack" in 1967 was launched - without warning or declaration of war - by Israel on Egypt, Jordan, and Syria - and not the other way around as you deceitfully claim.

Israel did, as you say - seize the West bank for alleged security reasons, and then went on to deprive the people who lived there of basic human rights and the property they had owned for centuries.

That is why Israel is a pariah state in the eyes of most people in the world.

Advocate wrote:

. The culmination of all this was the massive attack by the Arab countries and the Pals on Israel in the '67 War.

Do you mean to revise this lie ????

The fact is this deceitful propaganda doesn't work very well anymore. The blinders are off and most people see Israel for what it really is.

It's getting harder for the US to play this game; the Vietnamese, at great cost to them, sent you assholes packing with your tails between your legs. The Nicaraguans also sent the asshole terrorists you trained to rape, torture and murder innocents packing.

Obama doesn't want to veto a UN proposal to unilaterally recognize a Palestine state. Therefore, he continues to press Israel hard to reach an accord with the Pals on this issue. But this is unrealistic, to say the least.

In regard to the first developement, statehood recognition by the UN won't mean anything without US consent, and it's expected to vote against the measure.

Israel is an ally, not a subject nation.

And Obama tried spewing anti-Semitism at Israel, and that resulted in Israel no longer taking him seriously.

Nope. They were rebuffed because Palestinians like murdering children, and refuse to make peace.

There is no "Right of Return".

If the Palestinians were at all capable of peace, they wouldn't be facing Netanyahu right now.

Nope. The Palestinians have been refusing to show up at the negotiations unless Israel first agreed to an unreasonable demand to halt settlement construction.

There was no agreement, therefore Israel did not renege on an agreement.

The only "Palestinian principle" is their desire to murder civilians. But if PA officials considered selling out that "principle" I can see why they'd want to keep it quiet.

No such thing. All the terrorists are Palestinians.

Nope. The principle objective of the Palestinians is to murder as many civilians as they can.

Because they're Palestinians. All Palestinians ever do is murder people.

. . . nuke Islam out of existence. . .

You're starting to sound like a Palestinian yourself with your calls to attack innocent people.