Thursday, June 18, 2009
Khaled Abu Toameh explains why the PA reaction to Netanyahu speech came out as it did: Why was PA reaction to Netanyahu's speech so harsh?
The Palestinian Authority leadership's hysterical, hasty and clearly miscalculated response to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speech at Bar-Ilan University on Sunday night is likely to boomerang because it makes the Palestinians appear as "peace rejectionists."...
...Even before he completed his speech, several PA officials and spokesmen used every available platform to declare their total rejection of Netanyahu's ideas, especially with regards to the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.
Some went as far as hurling personal insults at Netanyahu, branding him a liar, a fraud and a swindler. Others hinted at the possibility that, in the wake of his strategy, the Palestinians would now have to resort to another intifada.
PA representatives are now saying that Netanyahu "cannot even dream of finding one Palestinian to talk to."
One senior official in Ramallah announced shortly after the prime minister finished his address that the Palestinians won't resume peace talks with Israel for at least a thousand years.
The harsh response of the PA is the direct result of high hopes that its leaders have pinned on the administration of US President Barack Obama.
Reports about a looming crisis between the administration and Netanyahu over the future of the Middle East peace process, combined with Obama's conciliatory approach toward the Arab and Muslim worlds, created the impression in Ramallah that the Israeli government had no choice but to accept all the Palestinian demands...
Of course. It's the typical miscalculation that weakness on the part of America breeds.
It reaches - without any exaggeration in the least - cartoonish proportions. It's as if we're listening to Yosemite Sam rail against some newly perceived slight or the Road Runner in a similar, full-bore reactionary mode.
Again, without any exaggeration. I believe that to be an honest appraisal.
Which is why Obama leaning hard on Netanyahu while smiling receptively to Abbas recently is all the more absurd. Obama already seems like a bit of a cartoon character as it is - not at all being cruel, but the combination of the angular and lean physical appearance together with the seeming narcissism and the now far too predictable cadenced rhetoric, as if every word and phrase is from G_d on high - but this is reaching still sillier and self-parodying proportions, all hugely out of scale to the realities.
Time to listen to some Cohen - Leonard, not Richard or Roger this time.
Here, here, Michael! But first we take Manhattan!
Or as the Brits might say, "hear, hear!" It's been a long day...
Obama is a the master cultural and moral relevatist. That bodes ill for good, right, and successful and well for evil, wrong, and failed.
Radical egalitarianism....leeds to kneecapping liberty, and promoting Islamic supremacism.
The Europeans figured out finally, that if that is the game, then they are going for European Supremacism, so that the compromise isnt all one way.
The Western Left is a pox on humanity.