"The Palestinians chose their leader themselves. No, I did not take Jimmy Carter seriously, when he wrote in the NYT some time ago that those elections were clean and fair. And I realize that there may have not been any serious competition. Yes, Clinton, Rabin and the EU are at fault, too. But the bottom line is that the Palestinians were given a chance at democracy, and they blew it by overwhelmingly electing Arafat. And this is a classic case of a people who deserve their leader, because he is the embodiment of what they are at their worst." - Alisa
"While I remain sympathetic to the individual Palestinians who are truly blameless, my tolerance for the vile behavior of the Palestinian society is at an end. It is a sick and diseased creature in its current state, and it should be put down. In time, perhaps, a new culture can be grown in its place; one that satisfies the aspirations of the Palestinian people while not reflexively bringing murder to its neighbors." - BearTruth
"And to think that a whole swathe of wet leftie know-nothings (including Assad's man in the UNGA) called Jenin an instance of Israeli 'brutality.' Do any of them really know what brutality looks like? Were Israel to act like just another Middle Eastern shitpile, there wouldn't be a terrorism problem in Israel because there wouldn't be any terrorists because they, and their families, and their neighbours, and their neighbours' neighbours would all be dead or deported to Jordan. Why send in the IDF on foot into Jenin going from house to house when they could simply have used the Assad method: encircle the town with tanks and artillery pieces and simply reduce it to rubble? Why bother with the specific targetting of militants when it would be far more thorough to simply do what the Kuwaitis did after the Gulf War, and expel a few hundred thousand Palestinians? When Israel occupied Lebanon there was outraged condemnation. Now that Syria occupies Lebanon no one is interested. While Hafez al-Assad was flattening Hama, the UN were too busy fulminating about the IAF's attack on Iraq's nuclear reactors to notice. And in spite of this, Boy Assad's lackey is able to pontificate in the UNGA meetings as though he were Gandhi's fucking star pupil. That's what I hate about the UN." - Stephen Chapman
"Arafat did little or nothing to control the various PLO factions or to discipline his own men. He would claim control of the Palestinian movement when beneficial to do so and point to "renegade" organizations over which he claimed he had no control when it suited him." - Novell B. DeAtkine, talking about Arafat's activities in Jordan in 1970, showing that you can't teach an old dog
new tricks"After the attack against us in September of 2001, and after the long series of attacks inside Israel, it's easy to come to the conclusion that all Arabs are insane and love killing more than they love life. That's false. It isn't even close to true. Those who died in the attack against us were very carefully selected, for instance, and the Palestinians have turned their entire education system into one big indoctrination system to try to turn kids into potential bombers. And even with that, they don't come up with all that many who are willing to try it." - Stephen Den Beste
"I've reached the point where I assume that anything that any high ranking Palestinian says is a lie unless I see independent evidence supporting it." - Stephen Den Beste
"After the Passover Seder Massacre, anything -- I mean goddamn anything -- the Palestinians get better than a boot to the teeth is pure gravy." - Stephen Green
"In this conflict, the Israelis *could* annihilate the Palestinians - but don't. The Palestinians *would* annihilate the Israelis - but can't." - Godless Capitalist
"Just because I have dreams of being Jerry Seinfeld doesn't mean I don't feel passionately about real issues. And, at the risk of pissing people off, I'm going to address "Israel v. Terrorism" today. Some of you might think this is actually "Israel v. Palestine," but there's absolutely no evidence there is anything called "Palestine" at all. Or if there is, it certainly looks like "Terrorism." - S. Aidan Finley
"Millions in the Middle East are obsessed with Israel, whether they live in sight of Tel Aviv or thousands of miles away. Their fury doesn't spring solely from genuine dismay over the hundreds of Muslims Israel has killed on the West Bank; after all, Saddam Hussein butchered hundreds of thousands of Shiites, Kurds and Iranians, while few in Cairo or Damascus said a word. Syria's Hafez Assad liquidated perhaps 20,000 in sight of Israel, without a single demonstration in any Arab capital. The murder of some 100,000 Muslims in Algeria and 40,000 in Chechnya in the last decade provoked few intellectuals in the Middle East to call for a pan-Islamic protest. Clearly, the anger derives not from the tragic tally of the fallen but from Islamic rage that Israelis have defeated Muslims on the battlefield repeatedly, decisively, at will and without modesty.
If Israel were not so successful, free and haughty--if it were beleaguered and tottering on the verge of ruin--perhaps it would be tolerated. But in a sea of totalitarianism and government-induced poverty, a relatively successful economy and a stable culture arising out of scrub and desert clearly irks its less successful neighbors. Envy, as the historian Thucydides reminds us, is a powerful emotion and has caused not a few wars.
If Israel did not exist, the Arab world, in its current fit of denial, would have to invent something like it to vent its frustrations. That is not to say there may not be legitimate concerns in the struggle over Palestine, but merely that for millions of Muslims the fight over such small real estate stems from a deep psychological wound. It isn't about lebensraum or some actual physical threat. Israel is a constant reminder that it is a nation's culture--not its geography or size or magnitude of its oil reserves--that determines its wealth or freedom. For the Middle East to make peace with Israel would be to declare war on itself, to admit that that its own fundamental way of doing business--not the Jews--makes it poor, sick and weak." - Victor Davis Hanson"Should the Palestinians immediately hold free and periodic elections, televise raucous debates of a truly independent Parliament, allow an open press and court system, send their reporters into Israel to learn of the other side's view, and begin nonviolent resistance to the presence of Israeli troops, they would accomplish more in 3 months than they have in 35 years. But then it might turn out that a free Palestine's biggest enemy would not be Israel - but governments like Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, who could not stomach such dangerous democrats right on their borders and who themselves would no longer have a convenient scapegoat to help vent their own unfree people's growing frustrations." - Victor Davis Hanson
"I still can't help but think that the Palestinians undermine themselves more with every passing day. And that is exactly as it should be - the reward for terrorism should be death; the tolerance for it should be precisely zero. Period. The nihilistic intellectual frivolity of those in the West who would rationalize terrorism or postulate moral equivalence between terrorists and their victims (and many have done so over the years - Vanessa Redgrave, anyone?) is something of a luxury afforded by civilization to people who are safely ensconced in the security of the very civilization they admonish and deride. Frivolity at base is exactly what it is, a particularly noxious and arrogant form of it, and it should be scorned and ridiculed at every opportunity by those of us who have a firmer grasp on reality than they do." - Mike Hendrix
"The recent attacks on Jews in Europe are quite revealing. Wasn't it the Europeans who just recently were warning of a backlash against Muslims in the United States--presumably by simple, unsophisticated, redneck Americans--after a bunch of Saudis crashed hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania countryside killing upward of 3,000 people? Now these same Europeans, when faced with disturbing attacks on their Jewish citizens by their Muslim citizens, sympathize with Muslim "frustration" at the situation in the West Bank. What a bunch of amoral, spineless hypocrites." - Michael Homburger
"There you have it, the essential idiotarian world view, stripped to its bare ugly skeleton. Forget historical context, forget morality—the only thing that matters is that one side is stronger than the other, and it’s acting aggressively. That side is clearly wrong, and no other standards of right and wrong can be applied to the situation." - Charles Johnson
"In America, we build stretches of fence along the Mexican border to prevent foreigners from coming in to take jobs. It takes a lot of audacity to demand that Israel stop building a fence whose purpose is to prevent foreigners from coming in to commit mass murder." - Charles Krauthammer
"Asking Arafat to give up terrorism would be like asking Tiger Woods to give up golf." - Bernard Lewis
"From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries..." - Bernard Lewis
"The British chose to call the land they mandated Palestine, and the Arabs picked it up as their nation's supposed ancient name, though they couldn't even pronounce it correctly and turned it into Falastin, a fictional entity." - Golda Meir
"There is no such thing as a Palestinian Arab nation... Palestine is a name the Romans gave to Eretz Yisrael with the express purpose of infuriating the Jews... Why should we use the spiteful name meant to humiliate us?" - Golda Meir
"It doesn't matter who's right and who's wrong. The second you resort to suicide bombings, you automatically become more wrong than Mike Tyson showing up for the premiere of 'Divine Secrets of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood.'" - Dennis Miller
"Look, you have to admit that Israel is in more of a no-win situation than a Ballpark Frank entering the Westminster Dog Show. They're a democracy trying to abide by Western norms in a region that does not play by those rules. I guarantee you, you plunk Switzerland down somewhere between Syria and Iraq, and they're going to be thinking about how to kill somebody with a Toblerone." - Dennis Miller
"That in exercising our basic right to defend ourselves Israel is condemned by Arab dictatorships is predictable. That today a Europe which sixty years ago refused to lift a finger to save millions of Jews has turned its collective back on the Jewish State is downright shameful. But my friends, I must admit. I expected no better from them. Yet the America I know has always been different. History has entrusted this nation with carrying the torch of freedom. And time and time again, through both war and peace, America has carried that torch with courage and with honor, combining a might the world has never known with a sense of justice that no power in history has possessed." - Benjamin Netanyahu
"Who's going to press a case against the Arab nations for their support of terrorism? Nobody, because to prosecute Arab nations for their support of Palestinian resistance against pizza-eaters, dance-club partiers, and sleeping five-year- olds would be an unfair imposition of our imperialist western values on the Arab Peoples." - E. Nough
"It is one of the great ironies of Middle East politics that many Arab leaders will blame actual European imperials and imagined Israeli colonialism for the region's problems, yet consider the fictional national borders drawn up by British and French cartographers to be inviolable from time immemorial." - David D. Perlmutter
"When Arafat does die, my plan is to videotape myself dancing in the streets waving a big yellow foam finger with "#1" printed on it, chanting "USA! USA!" and firing shots into the air. I'll send them the video with the hopes that Hamas will view it, and take a moment to ask themselves "Why do they hate us? Maybe we ought to re-examine our policies?"." - Rantlist.com
"1948: Arab runs toward Jew, Arab drops gun, Arab runs fast in the opposite direction.
1956: Arab runs toward Jew, Arab drops gun, Arabs runs fast in the opposite direction, but are stopped by the Americans and Soviets.
1967: Arab runs toward Jew, Arab drops gun, Arabs runs fast in the opposite direction-very, very, very fast.
1973: Arab runs toward Jew, Arab drops gun, Arab stops and backs up slowly and declares that he's won the fight." - Razib"It was like the Middle East in the 1990s. Blow up a school bus and Bill Clinton offers you half of Jerusalem." - Ralph Reiland
"[T]hose who portray the Palestinians as victims need to recognize that they're mostly victims of their own hatred and imbecility." - Glenn Harlan Reynolds
"Do not compare the murder of my daughter with the inability of a Palestinian to get to work by 9 am," - Arnold Roth, on the Security Fence
"My feelings about the so-called occupied territories are that there was a war. Israel urged neighboring countries not to get involved in it once it started. They all jumped in and they lost a lot of real estate to Israel because Israel prevailed in the conflict." - Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense
"When we talk politics with Arabs in Israel, they say, 'My grandfather used to live in Tel Aviv, and now it's owned by Jewish people -- we want to come back.' I respond, 'My parents came from Iran and Tunisia, but nobody is going to give our property back to us. It's all been confiscated... We have this little sandbox we call Israel. We give our hearts and lives to make it a proud country. Every one serves in the Israeli Defense Force in order for Israel to survive. You have half of the globe. What the fuck do you want from us? Go live in Saudi Arabia.'" - Kobi Shimoni, aka "Subliminal"
"Whatever the merits of their cause, the decision by the PA's corrupt and incompetent leadership to infect their youth with this death-cult psychosis has only postponed indefinitely any kind of Palestinian state. They need several years without two things: 1) Arafat and his bespoke apologists (Saeb and Hanan and co), who have nothing to offer; as I've said before, give 'em Switzerland to run and they'd turn it into a sewer. And 2) The UN: the UN and its "refugee" "camps" are one of the biggest obstacles to peace and are deeply complicit in both the territory's culture of corruption and its terrorism. The biggest mistake in this long tragedy was the original British partition of the Palestine Mandate in 1922, for no other reason than to carve out an invented kingdom for a Hashemite prince they thought could save them a few quid in administration costs. Penny wise, pound foolish. Jordan is a Palestinian state and Jordan needs to be involved in the final settlement of this question. If we're to have a second Palestinian state, it should include some Jordanian territory, too." - Mark Steyn
"This is the difference between a civilized nation and a barbaric political movement: The former takes care to avoid killing civilians, while the latter aspires to kill as many of them as possible" - James Taranto
"When a stand-up comic has a successful performance, he'll say of his audience, "I really killed them." When his show goes over badly, he'll say, "I bombed," or "I died out there." That explains why there are so few Palestinian comedians: In comedy, you can kill or you can die, but there's no such thing as a murder-suicide." - James Taranto
"The Arabs had all the land they needed; what they didn't want was Jews living next to them. All of the Arab-Israeli wars were wars of extermination, not an attempt to secure a resource, unless you're going to define "majestic, shining, Jew-free desert" as a resource." - Bryan Trosko
"In the minds of many campus radicals, for instance, the urge to somehow tarnish Israel, a Western capitalist democracy, with the brush of fascism was always there. I can see it in their deep- seated hatred for nearly all things Western/American, especially in the case of Israel because it's a western liberal democracy plopped down in a sea of third world disfunctionality, one made abjectly poor by corruption and the failed economic policies so ardently embraced by permanatly outraged campus radicals and one that also is mired in backward, nearly medieval cultural stagnation, which is praised as being more "genuine" than their boogeyman version of empty capitalistic consumerism." - Russell Wardlow
"The Palestinians have three stories. Their narrative in Arabic is one of mobilization for a war of jihad and non-recognition of Israel's right to exist. That narrative rejects any attachment between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, and it mobilizes the Palestinian people for a war with the goal of bringing about Israel's collapse. In English, the story is different: occupation, colonialism, apartheid. Those are completely irrelevant terms, which are intended to furnish the Western world with familiar terminology that clarifies who the good guys are here and who the bad guys are. In Hebrew, they have a third story: the peace of the brave. But I know the details and I say that Arafat is taking the name of Yitzhak Rabin, of blessed memory, in vain. He saw Oslo as a Trojan horse that would enable the Palestinians to enter Israel, and September 2000 as the moment of emerging from the belly of the horse" - Moshe Ya'alon
"The insight of Amos Oz, a liberal Israeli writer, is pertinent. He is haunted, he says, by the observation that before the Holocaust, European graffiti read "Jews to Palestine," only to be transformed in modern times into "Jews out of Palestine." The message to Jews, notes Oz, is, "Don't be here and don't be there. That is, Don't be."" - Mort Zuckerman