VIDEO: A Funny Thing Happened When the German Ambassador Visited the West Bank...

AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed, File

The German Ambassador to the Palestinian Authority, Oliver Owcza, was threatened and attacked by the mostly peaceful locals during his Tuesday visit to Birzeit University near Ramallah in the West Bank. According to reports, Palestinian students forced his car to stop, pulled open the driver's door, and pulled off a rearview mirror before chasing it down the road and throwing stones. 

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Another victory for mighty Allah!

I know it's wrong, but I can't stop laughing. 

Anyway, here's the video.

I can't laugh often when it comes to the Palestinians — and that brings me to a couple of points I've hinted at in previous columns but need to hit at much harder today.

The first is the myth — most often believed by conservatives — that there's no such thing as a Palestinian. While that used to be true, it no longer is. When the Ottoman Turks ruled the area that would become British Mandate Palestine after World War I, the sparsely populated region was known as South Syria. The local Arabs were a mix of mostly Syrians and Egyptians.

But since the birth of Israel in 1947, a distinctly Palestinian national identity has formed. Part of it formed from the hardships of Egyptian/Jordanian rule and then Israeli military occupation. Another part was imported from the West in the form of leftist grievance culture — the idea that every minority is persecuted and violence is the solution. Another import from the West is Marxist anticolonialism. Odd, considering that Jews have lived in "Palestine" for thousands of years longer than Palestinians have.

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It's amazing — and little-noticed — how much of "indigenous" Palestinian culture is actually postmodern leftism imported from (and often financed by) the West. Talk about your cultural imperialism, right?

Less distinct to Palestinians but still a vital portion of their national identity is militant Islam's violent intolerance for any and everyone who hasn't submitted to Allah. 

That's a volatile four-part mixture, and I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to decide what the proportions are of each. Shaken together for 80 years, a distinctly Palestinian identity/Arab subculture has formed — and it is particularly noxious. 

So much so that the German ambassador can't make a goodwill visit to a local university without having his life threatened. So much so that no other Arab nation in the region wants to take in Palestinian refugees in anything more than token numbers. They're hostile to everyone, not just to the Jews.

The second is the myth of the "two-state solution" for peace between Israel and the Arab residents-cum-virtual-citizens of the non-Israel parts of the old British Mandate. If that sentence was a bit of a headache, there's a good reason for that.

We already have a three-state solution, and how's that working out? Gaza and the PA-ruled parts of the West Bank are states in all but name — and possibly the worst-run states in a region hardly known for good governance.

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I don't pretend to offer a solution, but I do know that a solution is impossible for as long as we refuse to acknowledge these uncomfortable truths. Ambassador Owcza refused to acknowledge them and it almost cost him his life.

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