CONDOLEEZZA RICE'S MAGICAL 70 PERCENT SOLUTION. Back in October 2006, Condoleezza Rice made the following statement in an interview with Cal Thomas:

you can look at any opinion poll in the Palestinian territories and 70 percent of the people will say they're perfectly ready to live side by side with Israel because they just want to live in peace. And when it comes right down to it, yeah, there are plenty of extremists in the Palestinian territories who are not going to be easily dealt with. They have to be dealt with — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories — they're terrorists and they have to be dealt with as terrorists.

But where did that magical number of 70% come from?

If you look at the chart from the recent Pew survey--the one showing a decline in Muslim approval for suicide bombers--you can see that the total percentage of Palestinians who strongly agree that suicide bombings of civilians are justified (41%) and those who think that they are only sometimes justified (29%): the total comes to 70%. This of course leaves out the 11% who think that suicide bombings of civilians are only rarely justified--not to mention the whopping 6% who think they are never justified (or the 12% who have no opinion).

If Rice is running US policy based on the assumption that 70% of Palestinians are really ready to live in peace--which would be a fair requirement before requiring more irreversible unilateral concessions from Israel--now would be a really swell time for her to reveal the source of her information.

Let's hope she's not getting this from Carter's friends, the Saudis.

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