As I watched President Obama’s speech yesterday, I felt like I was having a flashback to law-school lectures of yesteryear — where credentialed professors would display breathtaking ignorance of history, of Middle Eastern culture, and of human nature as they suggested again and again that peace was possible if only Israel made concession after concession, if only Israel would acquiesce to a security situation Americans would never tolerate. The best-case academic mindset was moral equivalence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The normal view was that Middle Eastern rage existed because of American and Israeli aggression.
Left out of the discussion was even the possibility that pure, genocidal evil was driving Israel’s most aggressive antagonists. Left out of the discussion was the idea that a culture of anti-Semitism existed in the Muslim world and that anti-Semitism was a breeding ground for violent jihad. An academic community eager to expose and confront racism everywhere turned a blind eye to horrific and explicitly racist rhetoric seeping out from every quarter of the Arab world.
Our academic community dwells endlessly on settlements yet ignores the expulsion of more than 800,000 Jews from Arab lands after 1948. Our academic community calls endlessly for “tolerance” and “understanding” of Muslim grievances even as churches burn and 2,000-year-old Christian communities vanish before our eyes. The academic class simply will not hold the Muslim world to the same standards it holds the West.
Barack Obama is our professor-president, and his speech betrayed all the hallmarks of academe’s trademark combination of condescension, misplaced idealism, and ignorance. (Are Palestinian militants — or even the Arab protestors in Egypt and Libya – really comparable to American revolutionaries?)
In Iraq I saw the pure hate that drives the Islamic jihad. The practical effect of the president’s speech will be to reward that hate by attempting to drive Israel into worst-case concessions as a starting point for new negotiations — negotiations with a Hamas-led government, no less. As I noted yesterday in my initial reaction to the speech, this is unprecedented, shocking, and — worst of all — fundamentally irresponsible.
Don't forget how the League of Nations, specifically Great Britain, ironically failed the Jewish people in Palestine. It seems even time cannot erode the grip that western powers try to continue in the area.
It's been almost a century of trying to divy up the land. The result? Global fanaticism.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis post shows a very basic ignorance of the Arab world and Middle Eastern Muslims in general. This sort of demonization of 'the other' (e.g. "the possibility that pure, genocidal evil...") without any effort to understand the historical 'real-life' reasons why this resentment exists, is precisely the reason why peace has eluded that particular region of the world for so long. Bling religious fanaticism and a lack of practical mindedness exists on both sides.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe speech just confirms what his education, political allies, and general world view strongly implied already about his views of Israel. He's always thought this way; now the world (and the voters) know.
In that sense, it was good that he gave the speech, because now the Israelis know beyond any doubt not to take President Obama seriously. They can shift without hesitation into survive-until-the-clock-runs-out-on-his-presidency mode. (If they had not already.)
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse@seve-It seems that the problems in the region cannot be strictly chalked up as the result of both sides failing to understand one another. An approach that equally blames both sides accomplishes nothing, at least when one side has a large number of people who believe the other should not even exist at all. Until the majority of active Muslims in the region accept the existence of Israel there can be no peace. At an academic level it may be nice to sit and debate where the Muslim resentment (and for some, yes, genocidal hatred) of Israel comes from---religion, resentment of Western intervention in the region, the lack of any cohesive Arab nationalism due to domination by outsiders over the last 5 centuries (Ottomans, Brits, French), etc.---but in real life, that is hard to accomplish. Going back to pre-1967 borders will do as much for peace as giving Hitler the Sudetenland.
Also, the religious fanatics seem to mainly be on one side as Israel is hardly a state dominated by religious groups. Do they have influential religious people? Of course, but Israel was and is dominated by secular Jews, especially those who led the nation in earlier wars such as the 6-Day War of 1967.
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