While Moslems Assimilate Israel

In his column in The New York Times, Wesley Clark--to no one's surprise--critiques the way the war is being waged in Iraq. One point he makes is that:

As one prominent Kuwaiti academic explained to me, in the Muslim world the best way to deal with your enemies has always been to assimilate them - you never succeed in killing them all, and by trying to do so you just make more enemies. Instead, you must woo them to rejoin society and the government. Military pressure should be used in a calibrated way, to help in the wooing. [emphasis added]

At The Corner, Rich Lowry comments on Clark's point as follows:

It's odd premise that the historical strategy in the Middle East is for Muslims to "assimilate" their enemies rather than try to destroy them. That doesn't bear up very well in an examination of recent history- Israel, the Iran-Iraq war, the Kurds, Coptic Christians, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Sudan, Somalia, Kuwait in 1991 etc, etc, etc.

I don't know about the other examples Lowry gives, but isn't what we are seeing from Abbas and Co.--political assimilation?

Since they found that they could not "succeed in killing them all" the Palestinian Arabs have been lulling Israel by joining in all sorts of nice sounding agreements and wooing Israel with sounds of peace--without keeping to the agreements, least of all stopping the terror attacks. Each time Israelis are blown up and killed, the PA comes out with a statement on how Israel should not let such incidences stop the momentum towards peace.

Assimilation? What else would a one-state solution, or for that matter the Palestinian "Right of Return" amount to?

Remember Lowry's critique of Clark's theory--"That doesn't bear up very well in an examination of recent history- Israel, the Iran-Iraq war, the Kurds, Coptic Christians, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Sudan, Somalia, Kuwait in 1991 etc, etc, etc."

Of all those mentioned, only Israel is neither Arab nor Moslem.

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