Sunday, February 8, 2009
How many times do we have to read the same play to know how the script ends? Worrying about getting the Arab street, as it thinks now, to love us, is a dead end. You'll never win them over until you join them in their pathology. Their leaders have been leading them around by the nose with this hate for forever, and the Europeans have been toying with appeasing them with it and losing themselves in the process. We won't. We can't. The New York Times puts another subject on the couch and he doesn't need a relaxant to spill the truth as he sees it.
What makes the Times complicit and despicable in typical fashion is that they let the patient speak, thus giving weight to insanity, but then they don't twin it with a proper diagnosis, as though the subject's words have intrinsic value without explanation.
Alaa Al Aswany: Why the Muslim World Can't Hear Obama
PRESIDENT OBAMA is clearly trying to reach out to the Muslim world. I watched his Inaugural Address on television, and was most struck by the line: "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers." He gave his first televised interview from the White House to Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language television channel.
But have these efforts reached the streets of Cairo?
One would have expected them to. Mr. Obama had substantial support among Egyptians -- more than any other American presidential candidate that I can remember. I traveled to America several days before the election. The Egyptians I met in the United States told me -- without exception -- that they backed Mr. Obama. Many Egyptians I know went to his Web site and signed up as campaign supporters...
The euphoria was short lived. Something strange happened. Obama hasn't given them their candy yet:
...We also wanted Mr. Obama, who studied law and political science at the greatest American universities, to recognize what we see as a simple, essential truth: the right of people in an occupied territory to resist military occupation.
But Mr. Obama has been silent. So his brilliantly written Inaugural Speech did not leave a big impression on Egyptians. We had already begun to tune out. We were beginning to recognize how far the distance is between the great American values that Mr. Obama embodies, and what can actually be accomplished in a country where support for Israel seems to transcend human rights and international law...
...Again, his elegant words did not challenge America's support of Israel, right or wrong, or its alliances with Arab dictators in the interest of pragmatism...
Now this is interesting. Lest you think that all that would be required is to justly stop supporting dictators like Mubarak, and be a bit more "even handed" when it comes to Israel, this actually reinforces the idea that some people get the leaders they deserve. So what replaces Mubarak (and the like)? What happens if we give them what they want with regard to Israel, will they love us? What this author hears when he hears American words like freedom and liberty and fairness and justice are completely different from what you and I hear. Give him what he wants, and the results won't be what your wishful thinking makes you imagine you'll get. Garbage in to the system, garbage out.
Until the patient no longer needs his Prozac to stay under control, and is able to rejoin society in a self-sufficient manner, it's up to us, the physician, not the patient, to do the prescribing.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: NYT Op Ed: We Arabs will love you when you join us hating Israel.
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Here's an excellent piece by Bret Stephens that exposes the reality the chattering classes who derided Bush and praised Obama and Biden -- the people who fantasized about "George Bush's" War on Terror (as though it would all go away... Read More
And with a foreign policy team of Hillary, Samantha Power, Robert Malley, Zbigniew Brzezinski, we might actually start listening to them.........
BHG
Normblog also dissects the article:
"In a piece in the New York Times Alaa Al Aswany...also writes:
"We... wanted Mr. Obama, who studied law and political science at the greatest American universities, to recognize what we see as a simple, essential truth: the right of people in an occupied territory to resist military occupation."
...passing over or fudging the point that the right of resistance does not include a right to commit war crimes or crimes against humanity, as Hamas patently does. Even those resisting tyranny or occupation are prohibited from the deliberate targeting of civilians. On war crimes, I have given the relevant sources in Part 3 here. For crimes against humanity, the Rome Statute of the ICC makes it clear that this prohibition applies not only to fully-fledged state actors but also to organizations and movements. At Article 7.2 (a) it reads:
"Attack directed against any civilian population" means a course of conduct involving the multiple commission of acts referred to in paragraph 1 against any civilian population, pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack."
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2009/02/resistance-within-moral-limits.html
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The fact that Alaa Al Aswany so easily translates 'resistence' into "Hamas" has to do with the very good propaganda work done by the Indecent Lefties and Jimmy Carter.