Friday, April 6, 2007
The British are having "humanitarian" talks with Hamas in order to try to free kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston. Hamas is, of course, heralding this as a success for them, and the beginning of the end of the diplomatic boycott. The irony of the event -- that the British are speaking to them only to save a life, and that this should actually not be an event to be proud of -- never occurs to them. And why should it? The Palestinian national movement "exploded" in the consciousness of the world through the kidnap and murder of Olympians, kidnapped and murdered diplomats, bombed and murdered civilians and hijacked airliners. It's been a successful strategy in a world that won't judge.
UK in talks with Hamas over BBC reporter
A Foreign Office spokesman said that the meeting with Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian prime minister, was authorised as a humanitarian emergency, and stressed that a European Union ban on all other contact with Hamas representatives remained.
However, this did not stop the newly formed Palestinian unity government claiming that it marked the beginning of the end of the boycott.
Mustafa Barghouti, the Palestinian information minister, called the meeting a "good development".
He said: "It doesn't matter what the topic is. I think they [the British] are developing the position of the EU in a positive way."...
"The Palestinian national movement "exploded" in the consciousness of the world through the kidnap and murder of Olympians, kidnapped and murdered diplomats, bombed and murdered civilians and hijacked airliners. It's been a successful strategy in a world that won't judge."
Bingo.
There is a combination of disengaged romanticism (e.g., Carter, most on the Left) and purported realism (e.g., Jim Baker and Co., Walt & Mearshimer), among other factors as well (e.g., a debased populism) which continue to erode better founded ideas, founded in decidedly non-utopian, classical liberal forms. But those forms have their most elemental conceptions in people like Locke, Montesquieu, Smith, and in turn, pray note, even in some decidedly religious sensibilities/conceptions, not least of all those which appertain to self-restraint and intellectual humility, in the more elevated sense of that latter notion.
The irony is that it is precisely classical liberal forms which marry the best that romanticism and realism have to offer while carving away their excesses and more deluded qualities.