“The raging and chaotic civil war in Gaza (and incipiently in the West Bank) is hard to deny. Marty Peretz sees the same pattern as Iraq. So here’s a question for Marty: if Arab cultures are completely immune to democratic life, as he has long argued, why does he support the coercive democratization of Iraq with the blood of young Americans? By his own logic, isn’t it doomed to abject failure? And isn’t staying there therefore a fool’s errand? This is one aspect of neoconservative thought on Iraq I still haven’t fully understood (and I was exposed to and often impressed by the frankness of many neocons when it came to the limits of Arab-Muslim political culture). By neoconservative logic, the U.S. has undertaken about the least viable, most intractable, self-defeating task on Planet Earth. Why? Once the WMD rationale was exposed as a delusion, why haven’t neoconservatives cited the pathologies of Arab culture to argue for withdrawal?”

have you ever, Roger, considered that some people – some GROUPS – of people – are simply more violent, more thuggish, more just plain Bad, than others???

Like, empirical experience says that (outside of all those excuses), the Palestinian folk are just not nice. Not the kind of people you want at your dinner table. Not the kind of people will run a city where the sewage is looked after. Not the kind of people that values “education” and a “future for the children” and “kindly neighbourhoods.”

Truly, why on earth are we giving these people any more time? Arafat, the source of under-the-table $$$ is dead. The party is over. It is time to just let them get on with their “lives”.

If it stopped with the word “security”, then I might be impressed. But as it stands, since the only realistic hope for Israel is for a lack (or almost lack) of violence, as opposed to Peace, it puts us, Israel’s supporters, in the unhappy and unintended position of wishing for ongoing internal civil strife and murder among the Pals themselves.

One of my first comments on this site several years ago (when Abbas was attending the first meeting with Sharon) included a quote to the effect of “We start off by hoping too much, and end by hoping too little.” I quoted it in an attempt to convey the notion that it was too soon for us to hope too little about the prospects for peace.

The Pals have done made a fool of me. Again.

and not just because they like watching the Palestinians making trouble for the Joooozzz. They don’t want ‘those people’ (the Palestinians) in their country. Look what they have done to Lebanon?

I say, continue the killing. Until all the people left over are sick of it, and move on to other things, like -maybe – building a city on the Mediterranean..

Gaza, by the way, became a refugee camp at the same time Hong Kong became a refugee camp. Both are on a big body of water. Gosh, I wonder what happened?? The United Nations welfare system, you think??

With reason that Sharon was the most farsighted and realistic of all recent Israeli leaders, not the murderous butcher described in the Western press. It is stunning in a historic sense to see that now some 10 years after the energetic naivete of the Clinton years, the false hopes at Camp David, the pandering to Arafat, history now judges, through the prism of reality, peaceful existence and cooperation a failure.