That appeared a few days ago, and yesterday I saw that (via
Instapundit) :
A Holocaust memorial in the Greek city of Salonika was vandalized with swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans.
In the June 17 incident, the word “Lies” was written on the bronze plaque dedicated to the 50,000 Jews of Salonika who perished during the Holocaust.
The vandalism coincided with the decision by the Salonika City Council to bestow the city’s highest decoration on the 30 Holocaust survivors still living in the city in a ceremony Monday.
This appears to be the sole mention in the media.
Going over to the New York Times.
The other day, the Times published
Mysteries of a Nazi Photo Album. The item tells of a book of photographs taken by a Nazi photographer and asks for answers about its provenance. A businessman who needed the money wanted to know the source of the photographs, so he could properly assess the value of the album, as he needed to sell it to pay off medical debts he incurred. Among the pictures were Jews who were about to be killed.
However a few months ago, after members of the Fogel families were killed the Times reported:
Yossi Kuperwasser, a retired Israeli general given responsibility by the Israeli government for monitoring Palestinian incitements to violence and to hatred of Israel, said in a telephone interview that while Mr. Abbas and the Palestinian Authority prime minister, Salam Fayyad, had been careful in their words, “they too encourage an atmosphere of terrorism.”
He noted, for example, that a senior Abbas aide had paid a call to the families of three Fatah militants killed by the Israeli military, conveying condolences from Mr. Abbas. Israel held the three responsible for the fatal shooting of a rabbi in the West Bank in December 2009. In addition, Israeli officials note, streets, summer camps and youth tournaments in the Palestinian Authority have been named for people who committed terrorist attacks.
Following the Israeli charges the Times reported that on the other side, Abbas was considered a moderate and that he rejected the charges. Yet a cursory look at
Palestinians Media Watch shows how prevalent antisemitism and incitement are in the official media of the Palestinian Authority. About ongoing antisemitism, the Times is remarkably incurious.
3) Buying not conquering
George Gilder's recently wrote an essay about how the pre-state Yishuv
benefited the Palestinians economically. Daniel Pipes has followed that up with a similarly infrequently-made argument,
Not Stealing but Purchasing Israel.
No, it is not. Ironically, the building of Israel represents about the most peaceable in-migration and state creation in history. To understand why requires seeing Zionism in context. Simply put, conquest is the historic norm; governments everywhere were established through invasion, nearly all states came into being at someone else's expense. No one is permanently in charge, everyone's roots trace back to somewhere else.
Both show different ways in which the creation of Israel was not a disaster, or Naqba for the Palestinians.
However, what do the Palestinian consider their latest Naqba?
"The deceased: 'Arab History'
[Date of] death..."
The man considers which year to add to the inscription as the year Arab history died. The dates he thinks possible are: "1948, 1967, 1993, 2003, 2008 and 2010."
That's right,
Palestinians present Oslo Accords as tragedy like Israel's founding and the Six Day War.
4) Reform
The other day the Washington Post wrote a hopeful editorial about
Reforming the Arab Monarchies.
Last week its reform-minded king, 47-year-old Mohammed VI, spelled out a flawed but potentially workable way forward, both for his own country and for other Arab monarchies.The king proposed a series of constitutional reforms that, while stopping well short of the opposition’s demand for a genuine democracy, would shift power to an elected parliament. After elections, the monarch would be obligated to choose a head of government from the parliament’s largest party, and that leader would in turn select ministers and other senior officials. Parliament itself would be given more powers, and the judiciary would become independent. Constitutional language pronouncing the king “sacred” would be softened.The king would retain extensive powers: He would command the armed forces, appoint diplomats, ambassadors and provincial governors, and retain the right to dissolve the parliament after consulting with the supreme court — half of whose members he would appoint. A youth-led opposition movement that has been demonstrating in the streets since February was understandably disappointed by the limits of the initiative, and a few thousand returned to the streets of Rabat, the capital, on Sunday.
Among others, the Post suggests this could serve as a model for Jordan. I believe that Jordan's government is already a lot like this.
From news stories, I believe that in Jordan, the king appoints a Prime Minister and retains the power to dissolve Parliament. True the Post's editorial presents the developments in Morocco as the start of a process, not an end of themselves, still I'm not sure if this presents a huge change.
5) The word of Assad
Back in 1999, Daniel Pipes wrote
The word of Hafez al-Assad. The article was written in response to the prevailing "wisdom" at the time that Assad might be brutal but he would keep his word. At the end Pipes summed things up:
This, then, is Asad's less-than-impressive record of fulfilling his promises. It is worth recalling that at least some observers have understood all along that he is not a man to be trusted. Michel Aoun, who as prime minister of Lebanon in 1988-90 challenged Asad and lost, is clear-eyed about the man who defeated him. The Syrians, Aoun has said, "don't respect their word. They scheme, they promise you one thing and do something else on the side. They promised in the past, but they never lived up to any agreement." In a more eloquent phrasing of the same sentiment, Egypt's president Anwar al-Sadat recounts in his memoirs that President Jimmy Carter found that "the word of the Syrians was in fact a thousand and one words, and that what they agreed to one day, they rejected the next, returning to it the day after."
(Read the whole article as it is also relevant to item #6 below.)
I was reminded about the Pipes essay because of the following headline:
Syrians: Assad Did Not Keep His Word:
Syrian refugees who sought shelter in Turkey say Syrian President Bashar al-Assad did not keep his word on reforms. "We have fled the Baath regime, not gangs. People, who believed in Syrian government and returned home, have been killed. We will not make the same mistake."
Demonstrating that offers
like this:
This move comes as the Syrian president offered another general amnesty Tuesday for those accused of crimes, Syrian state TV reported.
are bogus.
Like father, like son.
6) Light bulbs for peace
There's an old joke. How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?
The answer: One, but the light bulb really has to want to change.
The other day
Lee Smith wrote:
At present, the clique around Assad, including the security services and paramilitary forces, represents the most powerful gathering. They have spilled rivers of blood in tribal areas like Daraa not because they do not understand that their murders and mutilations have incurred blood debts against them that will last generations, but to show that they are powerful enough not to care. In other words, any peace treaty signed by Syria’s ruler would not be between states, but between confessional sects and tribes. The Alawites can’t cut a deal with the Jews, because they don’t have a deal with the Sunnis.
In a similar (but not identical) vein
Barry Rubin wrote:
In other words, Abbas is acting as if he’s doing the United States a favor by taking its money, diplomatic support, and flattery when he does absolutely nothing in return, and then demands even more!
Both judgments demonstrate the weakness of the old platitude
'You negotiate peace with your enemies not with your friends.'
It's not that the statement is absolutely false, It's that there's an important qualification. Like the light bulb in the joke, for peace negotiations to work, your enemy really has to want to change. i.e. He has to want peace as much as you do.
In neither the case of the Palestinians nor the case of the Syrians does Israel's enemy want to make peace. For one thing, as long as there's no peace, and peace is said to be in Israel's interests, they will be wooed and indulged. They will have maximum leverage.
For a while there was a sentiment in the administration that Assad was a reformer. It was a fiction that the administration was slow to repudiate. Even now, that the PA has allied itself with Hamas (however shaky that alliance is) the peacemakers refuse to say that Abbas has rejected peace with Israel.
But both have been tolerated because they've been deemed to be indispensible to peace.
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