President Cliche ... Alan Caruba

President Cliche

By Alan Caruba

“Peace is more than just the absence of war.”

“So let there be no doubt…”

“We stand at a crossroads of history.”

“There is no excuse for inaction.”

Fewer people at home and around the world are paying any attention when Barack Obama speaks. He has become President Cliché. We were all told what a great speech-maker he was and now nobody wants to listen anymore.

Ironically, in his speech to the United Nations on Wednesday, September 21, he actually said some interesting things. Too bad none of the other leaders of nations care what he has to say. At home, his popularity and approval ratings in the polls continue to plummet to new depths and to set new records for the lack thereof.

In truth, this is not good for the world or the nation. The job of President is all about leadership coupled to effective policies that address problems. In fairness, Obama arrived in the Oval Office with some of the worst problems any president has faced in the modern era. Like his predecessor, on whom he blamed everything, he continued to throw money at the financial crisis, managing to run up the nation’s debt to a historic level. Obama's economic advisors dusted off the failed policies of the New Deal and tried again. They have not worked.

The problems not only did not go away, they got worse.

The Middle East has seen the “Arab spring” in which a number of dictators were overthrown and that seems hopeful except for the fact that radical Islam is the solution that many of those same nations are likely to embrace. It doesn’t help that the U.S. President has famously demonstrated a “tilt” toward Islam as it continues to foment conflict.

The United Nations speech was a long wish list, pasted together with a lot of platitudes about how the UN has played a role in warding off World War Three. That was largely avoided because the U.S. has a couple of warehouses full of nuclear weapons and had maintained the greatest military the world had ever seen. We’re still here. The Soviet Union isn’t. Most U.S. presidents since the end of World War Two wanted to see the world abandon nuclear weapons. It didn’t. The club just kept getting bigger with China, North Korea, Pakistan, and India. Now Iran wants them as well.

The Soviet leaders weren't crazy. The Iranian ayatollahs and mullahs are.

Obama cited the UN founding Charter that called on nations to “unite our strength to maintain international peace and security.” In reality, it has always been the United States who did the heavy lifting. We fought the North Koreans and Chinese to protect South Korea. We sent arms to Israel when it was repeatedly attacked. We detoured into Vietnam and took a shellacking. After 9/11 we drove the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and we organized allies to remove Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein. Most recently, we got NATO to put an end to Gaddaffi’s reign of terror.

The problem Obama has discovered is that the United Nations is composed of many of the worst dictatorships and oppressive regimes on Earth. It is an utterly corrupt institution. It will not prevent World War Three if the U.S. leaves and a large number of Americans want us to leave.

“Peace is hard. Peace is hard. Progress can be reversed. Prosperity comes slowly. Societies can split apart.” Aside from the yawning banality of this pronouncement, the President’s learning curve about the reality of life on planet Earth has been a tough one. Still, he did condemn Syria’s dictator who has been killing that nation’s people, but could not resist showing off his Islamic credentials by saying many of the victims occurred "during the holy time of Ramadan.”

Obama has discovered what presidents since the days of Harry Truman have discovered. That Palestine is not a nation and the Palestinians are a horrid group of people who refuse to live in peace with Israel. “The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own,” said the President. Guess what? The Israelis agree, but cannot get their Mamoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority to actually agree that Israel has a right to exist. Or Hamas to stop lobbing rockets into southern Israel.

In case anyone was actually listening, Obama repeated what every prior President has said, “America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable. Our friendship with Israel is deep and enduring”. After spending the last two and a half years demonstrating his contempt for Israel, this comes as a real surprise and further proof that Obama will say anything to get reelected.

And then he ruined it all by saying, “To preserve our planet, we must not put off action that climate change demands. We have to tap the power of science to save those resources that are scarce. And together we must continue our work to build on the progress made in Copenhagen and Cancun.”

The major fuels of the modern world are not scarce. We live above an ocean of oil. There is enough coal in America alone to keep the lights on here for centuries. Tapping the sun and wind has proved to be a huge waste of money for two of the least productive ways to provide energy. Copenhagen and Cancun, the site of two UN climate change conferences were total failures.

President Cliché closed out saying—again—“Peace is hard, but we know it is possible. So, together, let us be resolved to see that it is defined by our hopes and not our fears.”

Our fears are what sustain peace. It is why every nation is armed to the teeth.

Obama is a national embarrassment. And he wants four more years in office.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

There is No Palestine ... Alan Caruba

There is No Palestine

By Alan Caruba

Despite a very forthright speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Sunday in which the President stated his “unshakeable” support for Israel and cited evidence of it, the greatest obstacle he must overcome with American Jews in particular and the public in general is a growing distrust of anything he says.

When it comes to the Middle East, Palestine, and the long history of Israel as a nation, past and present, President Obama doesn’t seem to “get it.”

Simply stated, there is no Palestine. In an effort to obliterate the nation of Israel, the Roman emperor Hadrian ordered that its name be changed to Palestine, a Greek word for Philistine, but other than this there never was a Palestine nation, nor is there one now.

To be a nation, it has to have been founded and it has to have specific borders. It has to have a capitol, major cities, an economy and currency of its own, and a stable government. It has to be recognized as a nation by other nations. None of these factors exists for the so-called West Bank and Gaza.

If the so-called Palestinians deserve their own state, why not the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey, and many other groups that could be deemed equally deserving?

What is referred to as Palestine is the wholly-owned creation of the United Nations through its UN Relief Works Agency, a strange invention that has existed solely to maintain the Arabs in the two areas mentioned as permanent refugees for generations. Sustained by millions in “relief” after the areas in question were lost in wars perpetrated against and lost to Israel in 1948 and 1967

There is never any mention of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who, over the course of the wars against Israel, became real refugees, forced to flee to Israel from Arab nations. In 1948, 140,000 fled Algeria, 75,000 fled Egypt, 135,000 fled Iraq, and 265,000 fled Morocco, along with others from Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. They were absorbed by Israel.

The West Bank and Gaza, historically part of Israel, are myths created to regain territory lost in the wars waged against Israel by Jordan and Egypt. In the 1967 war, Jordanians were driven out of Judea/Samaria and out of Jerusalem. The Gaza Strip had been occupied by Egypt. The Golan Heights had originally been ceded to Syria by a British-French agreement and likewise was lost to Syria in war.

The suggestion that Israel “return” to its 1967 borders is ludicrous. Obama might just as well suggest that Texas, the Southwest and California be returned to Mexico. All were prizes of war. All constituted parts of the North American continent settled by British and European immigrants to the New World.

By contrast, Israel became a nation in 1321 BCE, 2,000 years before the rise of Islam. Arabs only began to refer to themselves as Palestinians in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the State of Israel. The only period in which there was Arab control followed the conquest in 635 BCE and it lasted only 22 years. For 3,300 years, Jerusalem had been the Jewish capital. It is mentioned more than 700 times in the Torah, the Jewish Holy Scriptures and not even once in the Koran.

Until recently, the Palestinian Liberation Authority and Hamas were in a state of war with one another, the PLO was the creation of Yassir Arafat and Hamas is the wholly owned creation of Iran, as is Hezbollah. They exist for no other purpose than the annihilation of Israel.

Neither “Palestinian” group has ever accepted any effort to establish a separate state for self-rule, asserting instead that Israel must be destroyed. What has Israel done? It withdrew from its occupation of southern parts of Lebanon, only to be attacked again from there in 2006. It forced Israelis to abandon their homes and businesses in Gaza, ceding the land in an effort to encourage negotiations toward a two-state solution.

There is no Palestine and there never was. The name was imposed by a Roman emperor in retribution for the resistance of Jews against Rome’s control of their land. The name was adopted by Yassir Arafat as the self-proclaimed leader of the Arabs left behind by the wars and living, as is commonly asserted, in “occupied territories.”

Not once has any representative of the so-called Palestinians ever accepted a negotiated path to separate statehood. Instead, the “Palestinians” have sent suicide bombers and rockets into Israel and storm its borders to celebrate the “Nakba”, an Arab word for catastrophe, commemorating the wars waged against and lost to Israel.

The “Palestinians” and Arabs do not want peace. Whatever peace exists between their nations is tenuous at best and the citizens of many of those nations have been in full revolt against the dictators that ran them from Tunisia to Libya to Egypt to Syria to Yemen. The only thing that “unites” them is their irrational hatred of Israel, a hatred shared by many European Union nations and, of course, the United Nations.

In just over 600 days President Obama’s regime will end. He will no doubt link arms with former President Jimmy Carter to become another huge embarrassment to the United States of America.

© Alan Caruba, 2011
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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit.

The Unilateral Creation of a Palestinian State by the UN?

The Unilateral Creation of a Palestinian State by the UN?
Does the Obama Regime Support UN Creation of Palestinian State?
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

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Palestinian Authority officials say if Israel and the Palestinians fail to reach an agreement to create a Palestinian state, the Obama administration will support a resolution at the United Nations that would unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state (SOURCE).

In a report at World Net Daily, the following is reported: “Last year, Ahmed Qurei, former PA prime minister and member of the Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee, told WND in an interview that the PA "reached an understanding with important elements within the administration" to possibly bring to the U.N. Security Council a resolution to unilaterally create a Palestinian state.

Asked to which "elements" he was referring, Qurei would only say they were from the Obama administration. (SOURCE).

All of this just confirms our worst fears about Obama and his Regime. He is, quite likely, the least prepared President to ever hold office.

You know, I used to wonder if Obama or, at the very least, someone within his regime had actually read the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Now I add to that list of critically important documents nothing less than the Holy Bible. Obama is meddling in a situation that predates the United States of America by thousands of years. Much of the history, which leads up to the problems with Israel and their less than neighborly neighbors, is recorded in the pages of the Bible.

When one does a tiny bit of research, one finds that Israel has a claim to the Holy Land that dates back as far 3,700 years ago. They created a civilization on that terrain and developed a national language, which they have managed to maintain for at least 3,700 years.

Yes, they claim that land and they have a right to it. First, God promised the land to Abraham, then, the Jewish people moved onto to it and began to develop it and they made it their home. The world community saw it -- and recognized Israel as the home of the Jewish people and granted Israel recognition as a sovereign country ON THAT LAND.

So, how did Israel grow to the size it is today? As a result of wars that were perpetrated upon Israel by her mischievous neighbors. Israeli military forces captured the land Israel grew into as they attempted, successfully, to defend their homeland. Now, that land, too, is a part of the nation of Israel.

So what about the name Palestine? In the second century A.D., after crushing the last Jewish revolt, the Romans first applied the name “Palaestina” to Judea. Judea was the southern portion of what we now call the West Bank. It was an attempt, by the Romans, to isolate Jewish identification from the land of Israel.

There was never an independent Arab or Palestinian state in Palestine. It never existed, in all of history. In fact, when the Arab-American historian, Princeton University Prof. Philip Hitti, testified against partition before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, he said: "There is no such thing as 'Palestine' in history, absolutely not." In fact, Palestine is never explicitly mentioned in the Koran, rather it is called "the holy land.”

Going back to 1937 we learn that “a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: "There is no such country [as Palestine]! 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria." (SOURCE)

Until, roughly, 1967 the Arabs referred to that piece of ground as “southern Syria. “The representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations submitted a statement to the General Assembly in May 1947 that said, "Palestine was part of the Province of Syria" and that, "politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity." A few years later, Ahmed Shuqeiri, later the chairman of the PLO, told the Security Council: "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria." (SOURCE)

One must consider God’s promise to Abraham, the creation of a Jewish homeland with Jewish settlements upon the land as far back as 3,700 years ago -- up to today. Then, one must consider so much more including the Balfour Declaration of 1917; the League of Nations Mandate, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration; the United Nations partition resolution of 1947; and Israel's admission to the UN in 1949. And, finally, add to all of the above the recognition of Israel as a sovereign nation by most of the country’s of the world. I suspect the Israeli Jews would ask that an observer also note their thriving society.

Now, when you consider all of the above, you must ask yourself why anyone would want the people of Israel to give up their ancestral homeland, the land God gave them, to the people of a country that never, in all of history, EVER existed.

Remember, too, that these people, of a fantasy country, want nothing more than to push the Jews off their land and into the sea -- wiping them out of existence.

THAT is where Obama’s policy toward Israel and the so-called Palestinian people will lead.

When all of this is considered -- aren’t we justified in asking if Obama’s ties to the Muslim world are so strong that he has adopted their cause as his -- and pushing the Jews of Israel into the Mediterranean Sea is the desired result for both the so-called Palestinians – and -- for the Obama Regime?

J. D. Longstreet

Conservative's Wishful Thinking ... Alan Caruba

Israel's Next War Begins
By Alan Caruba
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As this is being written, the news is about an Israeli effort to interdict a “humanitarian” flotilla of ships that refused to dock at its port of Ashdod to have its passengers and cargo checked. When Israeli troops boarded a Turkish ship in international waters on Sunday they were met with violent resistance that led to casualties. The Israeli navy stopped six ships ferrying 700 people and 10,000 tons of supplies toward the Hamas-run Palestinian enclave.

I don’t know what the flotilla was delivering, but it is likely that among its passengers were Hamas terrorists and that there are weapons hidden among its cargo. That is why they refused orders to proceed to the Israeli port where tons of cargo routinely docks before making its way to Gaza. The flotilla was a deliberate provocation. Naturally, much of the world will blame Israel.

Having been in a state of war since its founding, Israel routinely has interdicted shipments of weapons to the PLO and Hamas. One of the most notable was in January 2002 when the Karine-A, a Palestinian ship, was found to have more than fifty tons of Iranian weapons and explosives.

Largely unreported are the fierce battles Egyptian Special Forces are waging in central Sinai with Bedouin tribesman smuggling weapons and fighters into Gaza on behalf of al Qaeda. As always, the Middle East is an asylum for the insane who, when not trying to kill Israelis, stay busy killing one another. I believe that war will come again soon and will originate in Lebanon.

In the end, the decision will be Iran’s, not Syria’s, its sock puppet and stalking horse. Syria has reportedly provided the Lebanon-based Hezbollah an estimated 1,000 Iranian-made rockets and missiles, all aimed at Israel. The last time the Israelis had to deal with Hezbollah aggression from Lebanon was in 2006. The conflict lasted 34 days. It is widely agreed that the Israeli Defense Force performed poorly and, not surprisingly, the most criticism came from the Israelis themselves.

Part of the problem at the time was an indecisive Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, who has since been replaced by Benyamin Netanyahu. If “Bibi” gets any intelligence regarding a pending attack, he will not wait around for it to start. On word of the confrontation with the flotilla, he cancelled a June 1 meeting with President Obama and returned to Israel.You may recall that in March Barack Obama accorded Netanyahu one of the nastiest receptions ever given an Israeli Prime Minister. Only the Dalai Lama fared worse, being ushered out the White House back door.

One might reasonably assume that the president is no fan of Jews after having spent twenty years in the Chicago pews of the Trinity United Church of Christ listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright say hateful things about them and about America. Obama has many close ties with black nationalists and anti-Semites such as Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan. One of his longtime associates is Palestinian apologist Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor.

There is ample reason to believe another attack on Israel is likely. The Syrians have reportedly moved the number of their army units to the Israeli border and have been supplying arms to Hezbollah ever since the last war.

Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been saying ever more crazy things of late. He even lectured the United Nations on the coming of the Twelfth Imam, a Shiite spook whose return will require massive worldwide death and destruction. More recently Mahmoud got into a fight with the Russians over the proposed UN sanctions. Iran is running out of friends even if its oil is not.The Israelis have been practicing war games that include long distance flights, the purpose of which may have something to do with dropping some very big bombs on places with Persian names.

While all this is going on, the United States is significantly building up its fighting strength in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf regions. Carrier Strike Group 10, led by the USS Harry S. Truman, pulled up anchor on May 21st and headed to the Middle East. That will put two carrier groups in the area. More vessels, including guided-missile cruisers and destroyers will be there as well.

No matter how it plays out, the Middle East is going to turn into a shooting gallery again. The Iranians, Syrians, and Palestinians in Hezbollah and Hamas are living testimony to why all those people demanding that Israel make peace with them are clueless or worse.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

America’s Anti-Israel President

America’s Anti-Israel President
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

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This past March, AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee) released a statement in which they took the Obama Administration to task for what they described as "escalated rhetoric" from the Obama Administration. In their statement, AIPAC said the following:

"The Obama Administration's recent statements regarding the U.S. relationship with Israel are a matter of serious concern. AIPAC calls on the Administration to take immediate steps to defuse the tension with the Jewish State." AIPAC went on to say: "The Administration should make a conscious effort to move away from public demands and unilateral deadlines directed at Israel, with whom the United States shares basic, fundamental, and strategic interests."

I agree with AIPAC. In fact, a growing number of Americans agree with AIPAC. There can be no question that Obama is anti-Israel. For anyone who has paid attention to Obama’s attitude toward Israel, it is clear that the American President is making a deliberate effort to destroy the US/Israeli relationship. With every back-handed slap at Israel and their Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, it is ever more evident that Obama wishes to break all ties the US has with our only ally in the Middle East.

The naiveté of Obama is going to cost America and the world a terrible price. For war is coming in the Middle East. The coming war will render the two current conflicts involving the US, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the status of Sunday School picnics.

Historically, whenever Israel’s enemies sense a lessening of the strong bonds between Israel and the US, they attack. Now that those bonds have been publicly loosened, if not completely broken, there is no doubt Israel will soon be under attack from both the north and the south and possibly even from Iran, directly, with ballistic missiles.

Obama may be afraid to use nuclear weapons in defense of this country, but rest assured that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is certainly not afraid to protect his country’s very existence with Israeli nuclear weapons. Israel has made it clear that in a life or death struggle, they WILL turn to their nuclear arsenal -- and they have a substantial number of nukes, more than enough to wipe out a few prime targets located in their enemies country.

On the immediate horizon, however, is the impeding air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. With the bonds broken between Israel and America, the Israeli government will feel no compulsion to “request” permission to strike Iran when THEY make the decision to do so. And that could be any day.

Of course, there is the strong rumor about that Obama will order US aircraft to shoot down Israeli bombers. Understand, there is strong hostility towards Israel from the left wing in the Obama Administration as well as from the Congress. Zbigniew Brzezinski, you may remember him as the former National Security Advisor from the limp leftist administration of Jimmy Carter, has suggested that it may become necessary for US aircraft to shoot down Israeli bombers as they pass through Iraqi airspace enroute to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. (SOURCE). Iran’s Bushehr reactor is expected to go online sometime this summer. Time is growing short for an attack to neutralize that threat to Israel. And Israel knows it -- and they have not been sitting idly by.

We can only speculate as to why Obama feels so hostile toward Israel as he so obviously does. Some have suggested that it is a result of the time he spent with Rashid Khalidi (reported to be an associate of Yassir Arafat at the time) while at the University of Chicago.

Whatever the reason, it has become evident that Obama intends to cut the ties between the US and Israel. Of all the blunders, and grievous errors in judgment Obama has made, so far, this is the worse, by far. It could easily blow up in his face. It could spark another world war. Blundering narcissistic fools who perceive themselves as Caesar-like emperors have a way of triggering events that lead to the deaths of multitudes of their fellow human beings. I fear we are about to witness one of those events. One might even say we are on the threshold of Armageddon.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned the legend tells us. Obama just makes endless speeches filled with the words “I.” “Me,” “my,” “mine,” and droning on about his accomplishments and his plans for his government.

Just over the horizon we can see the glow of the flames of an approaching conflagration.

J. D. Longstreet

The Futility of Seeking Peace with the Palestinians ... Alan Caruba

The Futility of Seeking Peace with the Palestinians

By Alan Caruba

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Here’s a notion worth considering; you cannot make peace with people that want to kill you. It is impossible to make peace with people who will not sit down and negotiate with you on any other terms than their own.

It is beyond impossible if you are seeking peace with people who regard your existence as a “nakba”, a disaster, a catastrophe.

Several U.S. administrations have foundered in their efforts “to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” That conflict would end the minute the Palestinian entities, whether they are the Palestinian Liberation Authority and/or Hamas would accept Israel as it is in 2010 and not demand that history be erased and that it return to its 1967 borders.

How are the Israelis expected to make peace with two Palestinian factions that don’t recognize the other as legitimate? Hamas actually drove the PLO out of Gaza at gunpoint.

Making peace is hard enough when the adversary is supported by a United Nations that has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than any other nation on Earth. Now that the current U.S. administration is led by a president whose hostility to Israel is embarrassingly evident, it makes it even more impossible.

This is, after all, a president who got in a snit over the building of new housing in Jerusalem, the capitol of Israel, by Israelis.

Would you trust the U.S. as a partner in peace when it is led by a president whose first act in office was to give an interview with the Middle East television channel, al Jazeera? Who then followed it up with a tour of the Middle East and a speech in Cairo that blamed America for its “mistakes” and its alleged failure to satisfy the demands of a Middle East.

The Middle East is the same place that spawned al Qaeda and an attack on the U.S. that killed 3,000. The Palestinians celebrated 9/11 by dancing in the streets.

There is something obscene for the current administration, filled with appointees and “czars” who are openly opposed to Israel’s right to exist, to conduct negotiations of any kind, but they began on May 6 after a break of more than a year.

These negotiations can only guarantee one result. Sometime this summer Israel will be attacked, probably from the Lebanese strongholds of Hezbollah. The Syrians, closely allied with Iran, have been shipping in all manner of new, more dangerous rockets. Neither Hezbollah, nor Hamas, both controlled by Iran, wants peace with Israel and both will do whatever is necessary to ensure it does not occur.

You can depend on the press to dredge up all the stuff about the poor Palestinian refugees who were driven out of Israel after it was initially attacked by several Arab neighboring states. No mention will be made of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who formerly lived in Arab nations that were forced to flee to Israel and no mention will be made of the Arab Christians who also found sanctuary in Israel.

The president’s envoy, George Mitchell, will shuttle back and forth between Jerusalem and Ramallah, a half hour’s drive away in the West Bank, in an effort to convince the Palestinians to sit down at the same table with the Israelis.

The Palestinians will insist on control of parts of Jerusalem as their capitol too, they will raise the refugee issue even though two generations of Palestinians have grown up in United Nations “camps” because few Arab nations in the Middle East will grant them citizenship. They will demand that the Israelis return to their 1967 borders and end their West Bank settlements. They are not “settlements.” They are Israeli towns on land won in war from Jordan.

Even Jordan made peace with Israel. Even Egypt made peace with Israel.

The Israelis have been sitting down at the table with the Palestinians for twenty years or longer. All they have gotten are more attacks on their people. All the Palestinians have gotten is the complete and utter failure of their leaders to build a separate nation that will recognize Israel.

To have peace you must make peace.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

The Turmoil in the Middle East

The Turmoil in the Middle East

By Alan Caruba

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It sometimes seems like we have been reading and hearing about turmoil in the Middle East for our entire lives, but the facts are otherwise. For most of the last century and earlier, the Middle East was a backwater of age-old Islamic repression.

Things began to change with the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War One. They had backed the Germans and, already in decay, it didn’t take much of a push to end it. The winners of the war, primarily England and France, met in Versailles where they took out their maps of the region and divided it between them. Nations were created, some with ancient names like Syria and Lebanon, some with new ones like Trans-Jordan. A nation called Iraq was created.

The Saudis got very little for having cast their lot with the English. They would never trust them again and when Americans came knocking with a request to search for oil, they got the nod, not the British.

It was World War Two and its aftermath that really got the pot boiling. The Middle East had not played much of a role. Initially the war had been fought in North Africa with an eye on Libya’s oil reserves and the need to protect the Suez Canal from the Germans.

Shortly after the war’s end, India declared its independence from Great Britain and, at the same time, was partitioned to create Pakistan and Bangladesh for those of its Muslim population that did not want to live with their Hindu neighbors. By 1971, Bangladesh parted company with Pakistan and declared its own independence.

Former UK colonies became independent, but with the exception of Lebanon, nations like Syria and Iraq were controlled by despots and their cronies. Turkey opted for modernity, but sheikdoms such as Saudi Arabia remained sleepy, oil-rich backwaters of the region.

The introduction of Israel into this mix, recognized as a sovereign nation in 1947, was the catalyst for some the troubles that roil the region today. Islam’s argument with Israel is that its existence invalidates Islam’s claim to be the single religion destined to rule the world, let alone the Middle East.

If one believed the ravings of its mullahs, Iran exists for no other reason than to destroy Israel and to bring about the return of the Twelfth Imam, a mythical Shiite figure, through massive global death and destruction.

More than sixty years and several lost wars later, Hamas and Fatah in Gaza and the West Bank have no other purpose than to destroy Israel in the name of Palestine, a non-state entity that exists only as a welfare recipient of the United Nations and other donors. Hezbollah, located in Lebanon, is a client of Iran.

Even if there were no Israel, the endless dissatisfaction of Muslims with their lot in life would ensure that there would be strife. The issue is not Israel. It is modernity and the tantalizing prospect of true democracy for a people that have never experienced it.

The real problem for the Middle East, however, was and is Islam, a political as well as social and religious entity. Until the rest of the world is prepared to admit this, we shall all be forced to pretend that Pakistan has merely been having a few problems since its founding in 1947, that the so-called Palestinians have any legitimacy, that Islam is "a religion of peace."

Similarly, the genocide taking place in the Sudan is based in Islamic intolerance. Other human rights abuses, endemic to the Middle East, exist because the United Nations has been largely captured by its Islamic bloc of member states.

When Iran experienced its Islamic Revolution in 1979, it is doubtful its ruling mullahs ever expected to see Muslims by the tens of thousands in the streets of Tehran in 2009 protesting their brutal oppression.

It took a Green Revolution in Lebanon to expel Syria from the domination of its neighbor state. Afghanistan, as the former Soviet Union learned, should be left to itself, Islamic or not, because its tribes are a friend to neither each other nor intruders of any description.

With the exception of North Korea, the world’s attention has been captured by a Middle East in turmoil, not because Islam offers a better, more just and humane way of conducting political and social affairs, but because it fails on all counts.

The rest of the world has to stand with those brave Muslims in the streets of Tehran and everywhere else they demand what the West enjoys and represents, modernity, freedom, democracy, and a chance for a better life for all who embrace it.

Alan Caruba

Conservative

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Conservative