Mahmoud Abbas, President for life of the fictitious democratic Republic of Palestine, where no voting takes place and which you can’t find in any history books, warned yesterday that without peace, Mideast extremism will hit Israel.
I sometimes wonder when I read speeches from Abbas if he honestly believes the general thinking public is as stupid as he makes them out to be, because each line he utters is with such dishonesty and such unbelievable chutzpah that people couldn’t really take him seriously… could they?
But maybe I’m being unfair so I thought I’d look at his speech to perhaps see if he is the one that’s right and I’m the one that’s wrong.
So in his speech the other day, he said the following lines
“Let’s leave everything in the past and let’s meet.”
It seems reasonable to the outside world, but for the fact that it has been Prime Minister Netanyahu who has consistently called for talks with Abbas and Abbas himself who has refused to meet. And as for the past, it is Abbas who is not willing to concede anything in terms of negotiations with Israel. One of the sticking points in which he is refusing to budge is the so-called right of return for Palestinian refugees. Abbas believes that every so-called Palestinian refugee, who is not actually a refugee in terms of the general definition of a refugee, must be allowed to return to what was supposedly their home in Israel. Now, it doesn’t matter what agreements, if any, Israel and the Palestinians will ever reach – if this so called “right” is granted to these false refugees, then it would simply mean the end of the State of Israel as millions of Arabs would pour into the country, overwhelming the indigenous Jewish population, replacing it with another Arab state. Abbas knows this all too well, which is why he has refused to budge on the issue. And when it comes to negotiations, history is the last thing that should be left in the past, because it is precisely our history that determines our future.
Abbas also showed enthusiastic support for the latest French initiative, saying, “It’s the international community that should determine what is right and what isn’t.”
This has been a typical Palestinian ploy that has been used for decades. Run to the world to solve a problem that they perpetuate. Palestinians are among the largest per capital recipients of foreign aid and yet their leaders cannot seem to find the money, among the billions of dollars received, to build anything of substance, other than a new museum showcasing the long history of Palestinian culture – which probably kind of explains why it’s empty! Netanyahu is right to reject the French peace initiative, because it’s not really an initiative at all, but will simply act as another forum to attack Israel. And it’s the kind of event that will automatically receive international support, as the world community naively and stubbornly continue to believe that the creation of a 23rd Arab state will bring in a new area of peace.
Abbas goes on to warn that without peace, extremism will take over everywhere. And once again he’s wrong, because the kind of peace Abbas wants is the kind of peace that encourages extremism not rejects it. History has always shown that if a country is willing to give up its territory in the forlorn hope of quenching a dictator’s thirst, it will not cause that thirst to be quenched, but will only encourage it to want more. This is precisely what was done when Israel effectively gave control of the Temple Mount to the Islamic Waqf after the Six Day War. It was meant to sow the seeds of peace, but as one can witness daily, it has only sowed the seeds of discontent and violence.
Any decisions Israel makes must not only be in consideration of their security needs, but also their cultural and historical ones, because it is almost a fait accompli that any Jewish site under Arab control will be destined for destruction, just as the cultural atrocities Jordan carried out in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem.
Jews are known as a stiff-necked people and nowhere in time is this more important than now, because it is better to be hated for living than loved to death.
