I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
No Respect In The Middle East
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Ronald S. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, has written an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal today, on the lack of respect being one of the main problems causing the elusiveness of peace in the Middle East: the lack of respect by the Palestinians for Israel as an established state, as well as the lack of respect by the United States administration (read, Obama) for a democratic ally.
In this article, he makes some great points:
Respect the sovereignty of democratic allies. When free people in a democracy express their preferences, the United States should respect their opinions. The current administration should not try to impose ideas on allies like Israel.
The administration would also do well to take heed of the Palestinian Authority’s continued refusal to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. This is not a trivial matter. A long-term settlement can only be forged on the basis of mutual recognition and respect. To deny the essence of the Zionist project—to rebuild the Jewish people’s ancient homeland—is to call into question the seriousness of one’s commitment to peace….
And then there are the settlements. Undoubtedly, this is a complex matter. Yet the administration must beware of overemphasizing it. Compromises between people of goodwill can be made on the settlements, as Israel has demonstrated in the recent past. But no compromise can be made on Israel’s right to exist inside secure borders unmolested by terrorist groups or threatened by belligerent states…
The administration must also be wary of letting Israel’s opponents use the settlement issue as a convenient excuse for failing to make moves of their own. The settlements matter, but they do not go to the core of this decades-old conflict.
The one comment he makes with which I do take some issue, though, is when he says:
That’s why an unambiguous strategy explaining precisely how Hamas and Hezbollah can be disarmed and how Iran can be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons is of central importance to any peace plan.
I think it’s a bad precedent to raise the issue of Iran’s nuclear aspirations in a conversation about peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Many people were upset when Obama started surreptitiously pressuring Israel to submit to some of his demands in exchange for more action on the Iran nuclear issue, and rightly so. After all, the world’s security vis-à-vis potential Iranian nukes and Israel’s security from Gaza-launched rockets and Lebanon-launched raids are two separate issues and need to be addressed on two fronts independently. Setbacks in one should not set back progress with the other.
With that in mind, I think it’s bad to raise the issue here at all, let alone ascribe to it “central important to any peace peace plan”!
Other than that, though, it was a pretty good piece with some pretty good points (oft-recycled talking points, but good points nonetheless).