Why Palestinian statehood is not in our interest

I hope to write my review of Scott Powell's latest Islamist Entanglement lecture on Egypt as soon as I get a chance to listen to it. In the meanwhile, Elan Journo of the Ayn Rand Institute has written an excellent op-ed on the topic of how the present administration has been acting against our interests in pursuing the creation of a Palestinian state.

On Gaza

For those needing further authoritative evaluations of Israel's so-called "disengagement" from Gaza, look no further than former IDF Chief of General Staff Moshe Yaalon. As reported in the Israeli Daily Yediot Ahronot (hat-tip Israpundit) Yaalon, speaking to Haaretz said:

"The intellectual failure of the disengagement is this: the fact that there is no one to speak to on the other side doesn't mean that we can ignore the other side and the effects of his activities on us. The fact that even the Fatah leadership is not ready to recognize the State of Israel as a Jewish state while it says it is committed to the road map peace plan doesn’t mean it is possible to ignore the fact that pulling out under fire is perceived as surrender and encourages terror," he said.

He added that "The disengagement was a strategic mistake of the first order. It brought about Hamas's victory. It emboldened terror groups. It has fueled the Palestinian struggle for years. It created a feeling among the Iranians, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda, that Israel can be beaten. That Israel is a society of spider webs as Nasrallah said or a rotten tree as Ahmadinejad said. And therefore the disengagement not only harmed us badly, but also harmed America's strategic war on terror in the region. It created a feeling among Muslim extremists that as it defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan it defeated us in Gaza and it will defeat us in Tel Aviv. As such, as they destabilized a super power, they will destabilize the west by defeating Israel."

Armchair strategists, such as Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson should take note.

Tracinski on the Suicide Bomb Morality

An excellent article by Intellectual Activist editor Robert Tracinski appears today in RealClearPolitics.com. Here's an excerpt:

For the great mass of Palestinians this worship of sacrifice is sincere. By rejecting every chance at peace and coexistence with Israel--breaking every truce and turning down every peace offer--they have lost everything and gained nothing. Taking the suicide bomber as their moral model, the Palestinians seek to emulate his fate: in their lust to destroy Israel, they are willing to accept the utter destruction and collapse of their own society.

Let's get the shorter items out of the way. I heard only a little from the Minnesotans Against Terrorism. They seem to be a good group speaking out against the blatant media white-washing and inconsistency on terror.

This has been one of my frustrations with the news for some time. In the case of Israel, the media refuses to characterize anything violent that the Palestinians do as terror and instead always identifies the perpetrators as militants. Interestingly, the media and some intellectuals also do the reverse to some extent, occasionally characterizing some attacks on military targets as terrorism. This is undesirable and unneccessary. The words terrorism, terror, and terrorist should properly only be used when the civilian population is deliberately targeted in an attempt to terrorize it. When such is clearly the case, as with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the like, to use an inappropriate term adds to the injury done to the victims.

I might also mention the morally unjustifiable habit that the media has of adding the death of the terrorist bombers to the total victim count. Proper coverage of such an event should always separate the deaths of the victims from the terrorists.