RICE CHIDES ARABIC STINGINESS

Regardless of how one feels about this administration's handling of Middle Eastern affairs, or the practicality of a Palestinian state, it's good news and orange juice to go with your breakfast when the oil-crippled United States government actually criticizes the grappling oil-rich Arabs for anything.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday chided Arab countries for not helping the Palestinians financially to establish a viable state, and she accused some states of trying to get away with giving as little aid as possible.

Rice, beginning a trip focused mostly on the Middle East, also said that it is too early to "despair" about missing the Bush administration"s year-end deadline for reaching a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

"States that have resources ought to be looking not for how little they can do, but how much they can do," she said when asked about the limited Arab support for the Palestinians in a briefing to reporters on her way to London.

They "need to put those resources to use now in order to lay the groundwork for the establishment of a [Palestinian] state," the secretary said, although she did not name specific countries to avoid being seen as pointing fingers.

In addition to "budget support" for the Palestinian Authority, help is needed to implement a "broad national plan" drawn up by Prime Minister Salaam Fayad and his Cabinet, which was presented in Paris, she said.

Read it all.

TROUBLE IN ANNAPOLIS

What would you do if your foreign policy agenda had these priorities:
* Get Arab and European support for solving the Iraq crisis.
* Mobilize Arab and European forces against a threat led by Iran and its allies, Syria, Hamas, and Hizballah.
* Get Iran to stop its campaign to get nuclear weapons.
* Reestablish American credibility toward friends and deterrence toward enemies.
* Reduce the level of Israel-Palestinian conflict.

That pretty much describes the U.S. framework for dealing with the Middle East nowadays. The Annapolis conference is not going to contribute to these goals. The most likely outcome is either failure or a non-event portrayed as a victory because it took place at all. No one is going to say: We are so grateful at the United States becoming more active on Arab-Israeli issues that we are going to back its policy on other issues.

On the contrary, the conference is more likely to show the inability of the United States to produce results, thus undermining belief in U.S. leverage in the region in general. It shines the spotlight on the most divisive issue, the great excuse for not doing more to help U.S. efforts, raising its prominence. What most of Washington simply fails to understand is that any real demand for Palestinian or Arab concessions will be fodder for radical groups and frighten Arab regimes, pushing the latter away from support for America rather than toward it. And any Israeli concessions obtained by this process will not satisfy their demands either.

Despite thousands of claims by lots of famous people, national leaders, and respected journals, solving the Arab-Israeli conflict will not make radical Islamism or terrorism go away. Would you like to know why? Because even if this issue could be solved—which isn’t about to happen for reasons requiring a different article—to do so would necessitate a compromise including an end to the conflict, acceptance of Israel, and compromises by the Arab side. These steps would inflame the extremists and make any Arab rulers who accepted it vulnerable to being called traitors. It would increase instability in the Arab world, also by removing the conflict as splendid excuse and basis for mobilizing support for the current rulers. Arab politicians understand this reality; most people in the West don’t.

Read it all here in the essay by Barry Rubin at the GLORIA Center.

Rubin's headline for this article is Drilling a Hole in the Lifeboat. But here's my own bit of painful, yet nevertheless, strategic wishful thinking. The operative question is simple. Is the United States still operating with a few aces short of a full deck in dealing with this foul enemy of basic human dignity and its phoney peacemakers, or is this rather the traditional final opportunity for the five families to look each other in the eye and declare themselves according to their own peculiar lights as rational businessmen just prior to the moment when the real turf war begins?

We know what happens next. Vito Corleone is hammered with bullets as the hapless Fredo fumbles about nearby. But this despicable action sparks the required no holds barred heroic response to take down these unlikeable mobsters who wish to spread its immoral oppression, in our case, around the globe. I'd like to think it is this latter scenario we are facing, in anticipation that Bush and company are determined that we must finally move this sixty year old family feud towards the finishing stage, which is a true peace built of strength of character and not some awkward and deceitful strength by religious police we see implemented across the sand belt from Africa to Indonesia.

But I'm not getting my hopes up. Old fashioned nationalism certainly seems to be taking a back seat to this push toward absolute globalism these days.

Breaking news. Same old Saudi smoke and mirrors. Yesterday we read in the Arab News that the House of Saud has released 1500 Al-Qaeda extremists, who were detained on charges of embracing and spreading takfeer (the ideology that brands other Muslims who disagree with them as infidels) after they repented. Today we hear that the Saudi regime has arrested over 200 extremists who have terrorist ties.

One must wonder how many of the 1500 released were rounded up again the next day in order to create a splash at Annapolis. It is the House of Saud, of course, who finances the madrassas and mosques around the globe including over 1500 here in the States. These schools teach the most virilent form of Wahabbism, including one in the Washington, DC area that several US Senators are trying to have shut down. No word on the traction of this shut down, but we shall certainly follow the story here.

THOSE TROUBLED PALESTINIANS

Illegal Jewish settlements on land where before there were none.

The late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir is infamous for uttering the bold political statement: "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people."

The statement has been a source of ridicule and derision by Arab propagandists ever since. They love to talk about Meir's "racism" when skies are blue and not bloody with Arab aggression they can never admit, eager to suggest she was in historical denial. They love to say her statement is patently false—an intentional lie, a strategic deception.

What they don't like to talk about, however, are the very similar statements made by Yasser Arafat and his inner circle of political leadership years after Meir had told the truth—that there is no distinct Palestinian cultural or national identity.

So, despite the fact that the woefully misnamed "politically correct" wisdom has now proclaimed that there is indeed such a thing as the Palestinian people, Ione must consider a few inconvenient quotations made by Arafat and his thugs when their public-relations guard was down.

On March 31, 1977, the Dutch newspaper Trouw published an interview with Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee member Zahir Muhsein. Here's what he said:

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

This statement requires no Clintonian parsing. It's even more specific than Golda Meir's statement. And it is hardly the only such statement of its kind. Arafat himself made a very definitive and unequivocal statement along these lines as late as 1993. It demonstrates conclusively that the Palestinian nationhood argument is the real strategic deception—one geared to set up the destruction of Israel.

In fact, on the same day Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles, also known as the Oslo Accords, on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, he explained his actions on Jordan TV. Here's what he said: "Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish a sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel."

No matter how many people convince themselves that the aspirations for Palestinian statehood are genuine and the key to peace in the Middle East, they are still deceiving themselves.

Let's be plain. In the history of the world, Palestine has never existed as a nation. The region known as Palestine was ruled alternately by Rome, by Islamic and Christian crusaders, by the Ottoman Empire and, briefly, by the British after World War I. The British agreed to restore at least part of the land to the Jewish people as their ancestral homeland. It was never ruled by Arabs as a separate nation.

Why has this issue become such a critical priority to those jostling on the world stage for power in this post 9/11 era? The answer is because of a massive deception campaign and relentless terrorism to push Israel completely out. Golda Meir was right. Her statement is validated by the truth of history and by the candid, but not widely circulated, echoes of Arafat and his lieutenants.

The path is before us. Israel and the West must not surrender to terrorism by granting the killers just what they want—a public relations triumph and a strategic victory. It's not too late to JUST SAY NO to another Arab terror state. It's not too late to tell the truth about Palestine, no matter how the apologists dress up their lies in sweet-sounding good intentions.

Now for another truth. On November 29, 2005, the United Nations in a so-called Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people, instead wiped Israel off the map. Read more.

And let us not forget that roughly the same people in the United States who vigorously clamor for a Palestinian state and the relinquishing of the "illegal" territories now held by Jewish settlers, also have no qualms about allowing "illegals" to pour into the US from the south, and elsewhere. Even the class dunce sitting with his nose to a corner can spot the trend here.