Andrew Sullivan has a strident "reality check" on Israel/Palestine and the Passover bombing:
Can we please take a little break from the "pursuit of peace" in order to acknowledge what we have just learned about the Middle East? We have learned that when the United States and Israel specifically demanded just a couple of days of relative peace, Palestinian terrorists made a point of slaughtering over a dozen Jews at a Passover meal. Notice the timing. Can we also aknowledge that the Arab summit in Beirut has also collapsed into a complete mess of infighting, squabbles and incoherence? So much for the alleged concern of most Arab governments for the plight of the Palestinians. The crisis over there is not hard to discern. Arab and Islamist terrorists, fed by a diet of vicious anti-Semitic propaganda, are engaged in a war aimed at the destruction of Israel and the second holocaust of the Jews. The Arab regimes who help foment the hatred of Israel to distract from their own corruption and failure would be perfectly happy to see this war succeed, and are already supplying the arms for the war effort. Every single attempt to forge some kind of truce between Israel and the Palestinian terrorists and the population that supports them has failed. The efforts have failed because the problem cannot be solved. One side wants to live in some sort of security; the other side, whatever it says in public, is committed to the destruction of what they call the "Zionist entity." The recent pathetic meanderings of the vice-president of the United States government have had one clear effect: they have emboldened the terrorists to believe, with good reason, that the more they kill, the more leverage they will have with Washington. And the terrorists are using our imminent attack on Iraq as even more leverage to wage an uninterrupted war against Israel.Posted by Dr. Frank at March 28, 2002 12:09 AM | TrackBack