By Barry Rubin
What is the definition of insanity? Repeating the same behavior and expecting different results.
What is the definition of Middle East policy insanity? Intensifying the same behavior that has already failed and expecting a better result.
Example: After 60 years of failure by radical Arab nationalism being intransigent, warring on the West, trying to destroy Israel, and seeking to create a utopian Arab society that turns into a ightmare, we are about to get six decades or so of revolutionary Islamism doing each of these things in an even more extreme way.
But here’s my favorite instance for today. For almost three years, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has refused to negotiate with Israel. It has kept none of its commitments, rejected every U.S. initiative, and wasted an entire year playing with a unilateral independence bid at the UN to avoid making a compromise peace. It has made a unity agreement with the genocidal, antisemitic Hamas.
The PA has also been rife with corruption and there is a huge economic catastrophe facing Europe. Oh, and the PA also maintains a huge, well-paid security establishment that doesn’t do anything useful and has on its payroll antisemitic preachers who spew hate
So how does Europe respond? Obviously by increasing aid to the PA by 20 percent, from 500 million to 600 million Euros for 2012.
That will teach them a lesson all right! But what lesson? Why the lesson that extremism, intransigence, refusal to make peace, inciting to violence and glorifying terrorism are rewarded.
Mr. Rubin:
You, I, and the rest of the world knows that a dying Europe lives for only one thing – the extermination of Israel and the Jews.
A dying Europe cannot accept the idea that us lowly, filthy, subhuman Jews might outlast their “civilization” (which as I have pointed out to Spengler, was never really civilized.)
Just a bunch of unrepentant Nazi savages, that’s what Europe is – nothing more.
“Why the lesson that extremism, intransigence, refusal to make peace, inciting to violence and glorifying terrorism are rewarded.”
Uh, Barry, those aren’t negatives, those are positives, from where the euros sit.
“So how does Europe respond? Obviously by increasing aid to the PA by 20 percent, from 500 million to 600 million Euros for 2012.”
This assumes that the Euro has any value greater than Confederate Dollars after this year.
The klepto-tyrants are doing just fine.
Although, I have to admit, were I in Klepo-tyrant business my first task would be to have several dozens false ID’s, a plastic surgeon and serious offshore accounts on hand. When the excrement hit the rotating blades of the ventilation system the surgeon would do his work and have an accident.
Then again, a business opportunity…”Bolt holes are Us”
ta
Let’s set aside Europe’s deep-seated anti-Jewish impulses and fashionably leftist self-flagellation for a moment, and look at another, vital aspect to the European approach to policy on the PA — an aspect that fairly leaps out of what Barry writes here. This look requires glancing, in tandem, at a recent column here on PJM by David P. Goldman AKA Spengler, and some of the comments it elicited.
Specifically, Spengler discussed the ascension to the Italian premiership of EUrocrat Mario Monti, and the visceral anti-Americanism he both espouses and shares with so many of his cohorts trying to stave off a truly market-based and genuinely effective rescue of his economy in particular and the Eurozone in general.
Both Spengler and the comment-posters highlight the irrational but irrepressible and near-constant urge amongst Eurozone stakeholders to fashion a separate-but-equal (or in their minds, better) solution to any issue that has already been addressed, nay solved, by sharper and more individually sovereign minds across the water in the US. To those of EUrocrat stock, all matters under the sun require the development and application of *specifically European* approaches and solutions. Ones that are Brussels-funded and -regulated, of course.
This EUrocrat urge manifests itself, of course, in the “uniquely” European approach to the PA — an approach that its advocates of course deem much more “nuanced,” among other superlatives. And so this urge represents a huge guaranteed-structural-failure point in the so-called “Quartet” — perforce there can never be consensus among the 4 actors in the troupe, even if by some bizarre cosmological accident the US were to be in alignment with the Russian and UN kleptocrats.
Essentially, Europe is a collection of crazy (in the past, evil crazy) old great-aunts and -uncles whom Israel just has to resign itself to humoring in very restrained (and self-restrained) ways; and in the process of so doing, Israel has to resign itself to the understanding that the crazy old great-aunts/uncles wrote them out of the will when bamboozled the other year by PA tricksters.
It sure sounds crazy of the Euros to send another 100 M bucks to the palestinian authority when there are millions of their own European brethren and sisters out of work and going down to poverty in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, etc. But it has a meaning. There is method to the Euro madness. They would rather hurt Jews –through the instrumentality of the Arabs– than help their own fellow Euros. Sounds sick, doesn’t it? It’s the disease of Judeophobia, which never disappeared from Europe after the Holocaust. Bat Yeor tries to explain the curious phenomenon of Judeophobia-cum-Arabophilia. See link:
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/101486/sec_id/101486
By the way, various recent reports tell us that there is a degree of prosperity in the Arab palestinian authority zones of Judea-Samaria, as well as in Gaza. Even in Gaza a five-star was opened a few months ago, called the al-Mashtal, I think. But the Euros would rather send the money to the Arabs than to their own poor.
See about al-Mashtal here:
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2011/08/good-life-in-gaza-dolce-vita-in-worlds.html
Paul Krugman, whom I usually don’t like, had a fairly good recent column in the NYTimes and the Int’l Herald Tribune about the Eurofoolishness in “solving” their economic crisis. As Krugman points out, and I agree, the Eurozone’s “solution” for the Greek debt crisis a year and a half ago made the situation much worse. Angela Merkel warned lately that if the eurozone can’t solve the debt crisis –which I think it probably can’t– then that would endanger the European Union as such. That might not be so bad. But anyway, they brought it on themselves. The EU does not represent any morality but hypocrisy.
See link:
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2011/10/euro-fools-cant-solve-their-own.html
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