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U.S. Sec’y of State Clinton’s Remarks at the Dedication of S. Daniel Abraham Center...
First there is the incredible gag factor that comes with her gushing. I think nothing is more ludicrous and outrageous than:
..and I sometimes look at the President when I’m with him and talking about some issue or another, and think about a grandfather who marched in Patton’s Army and a great-uncle who helped to liberate Buchenwald. And I know how rock solid and unwavering his commitment is to Israel’s security and Israel’s future.
But then, there are all the positions that have become standard -- the lies, misrepresentations and canards:
The way she has it, world peace depends on our making peace with the Palestinian Arabs:
lack of peace between Israel and the Palestinians threatens that future, holds back the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people, and destabilizes the region and beyond. (emphasis added)
[Previously] it was rare that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was raised. Now it is the first, second, or third item on nearly every agenda of every country I visit.
I don't believe this last sentence.
What does that mean? Well, it means that this conflict has assumed a role in the global geostrategic environment that carries great weight. And it also means that there is a yearning on the part of people who have never been to Israel and never met a Palestinian that somehow, some way, we create the circumstances for this to finally be resolved. (emphasis added)
Worst, there's the link to Iran:
And what I worry about is that a failure to act now when there are changed circumstances, including the Arab Peace Initiative, including the very broadly shared fear of Iran’s intentions and actions, will not just set us back, but may irreversibly prevent us from going forward. (emphasis added)
As to the mention of the Arab Initiative, as we know this would be something akin to a death knoll for Israel, her mention of it (hardly the first time) and active promotion of it ring bells.
And there is her outrageous evenhandedness, with everyone represented as trying equally:
Every step back from the peace table and every flare-up in violence undermines the positive players across the region who seek to turn the page and focus on building a more hopeful and prosperous Middle East. (emphasis added)
There are so many actors right now who are willing to make commitments and take actions that would have been unthinkable one, two, three, four years ago. I see my friend the foreign minister of Jordan, Nasser Judeh. (emphasis added)
She fails to mention the refusal of Arabs states to make any gestures to Israel, in spite of Obama imploring them to do so. Fails to mention it? Blatantly misrepresents the situation. This is simply a lie. And Jordan has been impossible.
She makes it sound as if the obstacles to peace come equally from both sides. No finger pointing at the genuine obstructionists, perish the thought:
Those in the region most hostile to peace, those in the region most opposed to compromise and coexistence, are those who do not have Israel’s best interests at heart and do not have the Palestinians’ best interests at heart. (emphasis added)
This is her vision, the vision of the administration:
Formation of a contiguous independent Palestinian State based on '67 lines will benefit Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. We all have to help the PA get stronger so this can happen. Israel has done some good things, but must do more. All the familiar demands are here, including settlement freeze and the situation in Gaza.
Israel can and should do more to support the Palestinian Authority’s efforts to build credible institutions and deliver results..
But easing up on access and movement in the West Bank, in response to credible Palestinian security performance, is not sufficient to prove to the Palestinians that this embrace is sincere. So we encourage Israel to continue building momentum toward a comprehensive peace by demonstrating respect for the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians, stopping settlement activity, and addressing the humanitarian needs in Gaza, and to refrain from unilateral statements and actions that could undermine trust or risk prejudicing the outcome of talks. (emphasis added)
After all Fayyad is working to build a state:
today hope is stirring in the West Bank because of strong leadership and hard work
Very problematic is her representation of Hamas as obstructionist and the PA as a partner for peace:
unfortunately, Hamas appears set on continued conflict with Israel... President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad have produced very different results in a relatively short period of time.
President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad and the Palestinian Authority argue for the two-track approach of pursuing a political settlement and institution building.
the Palestinian Authority has staked its credibility on a path of peaceful coexistence.
There are outright lies in her position:
The PLO has emerged as a credible partner for peace. It has rejected violence, improved security, made progress on combating incitement, and accepted Israel’s right to exist.
Fatah endorsed violence in its Conference last Aug. Fayyad and Abbas have escalated incitement of late -- making threats about a religious war in the area and the possibility of another intifada. Combating incitment? It's been very "in your face" of late, with the naming of the square and all the rest. As to the PLO accepting Israel's right to exist, not as a JEWISH state. And what about the PLO charter which explicitly denies that right?
The Palestinian Authority’s two-year plan envisions a state that is based on pluralism, equality, religious tolerance, and the rule of law, created through a negotiated settlement with Israel, and capable of meeting the needs of its citizens and supporting a lasting peace. Under the leadership of President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad, the PA is addressing a history of corruption and building transparent and accountable institutions.
Come on! A state based on pluralism and religious tolerance? Not according to the proposed constitution nor according to how the PA is acting now. As to a two-year plan based on a negotiated settlement, Fayyad threatens to go to the Security Council (which, admittedly, Clinton says they shouldn't do), and refuses to come to the table (which Clinton says they should do). Addressing a history of corruption? This is a joke.
Missing from this is any vision of what will happen to Hamas in Gaza. She -- as is the Obama administration-- is promoting a three state solution.
The good news here is that at least on the surface Obama is still promoting negotiations and does not seem inclined to support a motion for a state in the Security Council.
The really big change, which was also reflected by Obama in recent days, is the position that that the parties have to want this and the US, which will still help and "encourage" can't force it. Presumably there will be no Obama peace plan now. Looks like Obama has been advised to pull back so as to not look like a total failure and idiot. Looks like he's waking up to what's impossible.
We not only know we cannot force a solution, we have no interest in forcing a solution. The parties themselves are the only ones who can resolve their differences
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After Attack on Danish Cartoonist: The West Is Choked by Fear
An Editorial by Henryk M. Broder
The attack on illustrator Kurt Westergaard wasn't the first attempt to carry out a deadly fatwa. When Muslims tried to murder Salman Rushdie 20 years ago, the protests among intellectuals were loud. Today, though, Western writers and thinkers would rather take cover than defend basic rights.
In 1988, Salman Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses" was published in its English-language original edition. Its publication led the Iranian state and its revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to issue a "fatwa" against Rushdie and offer a hefty bounty for his murder. This triggered several attacks on the novel's translators and publishers, including the murder of Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi. Millions of Muslims around the world who had never read a single line of the book, and who had never even heard the name Salman Rushdie before, wanted to see the death sentence against the author carried out -- and the sooner the better, so that the stained honor of the prophet could be washed clean again with Rushdie's blood.
In that atmosphere, no German publisher had the courage to publish Rushdie's book. This led a handful of famous German authors, led by Günter Grass, to take the initiative to ensure that Rushdie's novel could appear in Germany by founding a publishing house exclusively for that purpose. It was called Artikel 19, named after the paragraph in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights that guarantees the freedom of opinion. Dozens of publishing houses, organizations, journalists, politicians and other prominent members of German society were involved in the joint venture, which was the broadest coalition that had ever been formed in postwar German history.
Sympathy for the Hurt Feelings of Muslims
Seventeen years later, after the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten published a dozen Muhammad cartoons on a single page, there were similar reactions in the Islamic world to those that had followed the publication of "The Satanic Verses." Millions of Muslims from London to Jakarta who had never seen the caricatures or even heard the name of the newspaper, took to the streets in protests against an insult to the prophet and demanded the appropriate punishment for the offenders: death. Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden even went so far as to demand the cartoonists' extradition so that they could be condemned by an Islamic court.
This time, however, in contrast to the Rushdie case, hardly anyone has showed any solidarity with the threatened Danish cartoonists -- to the contrary. Grass, who had initiated the Artikel 19 campaign, expressed his understanding for the hurt feelings of the Muslims and the violent reactions that resulted. Grass described them as a "fundamentalist response to a fundamentalist act," in the process drawing a moral equivalence between the 12 cartoons and the death threats against the cartoonists. Grass also stated that: "We have lost the right to seek protection under the umbrella of freedom of expression."
"I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong," commented then-British Home Secretary Jack Straw, referring to the decision by several European media organizations to republish the caricatures. Meanwhile, Vorwärts, the party organ of Germany's center-left Social Democratic Party -- one of the country's two largest political parties -- defended freedom of expression in general, but gave the opinion that in this special case, the Danes had "abused" the freedom, "not in a legal sense, but in a political and moral one." For Fritz Kuhn, the then-parliamentary floor leader for the Green Party, it was a déjà vu experience: "They (the caricatures), remind me of the anti-Jewish drawings from the Hitler era before 1939." With his statement, Kuhn, who was born in 1955, demonstrated that either he had a sensational pre-natal memory or that he had never seen a single anti-Semitic caricature in the Nazi's Der Stürmer propaganda newspaper.
Like Eunuchs Talking about Sex
It was like listening to the blind talk about art, the deaf about music or eunuchs discussing sex based on hearsay. Because with the exception of the left-wing Die Tageszeitung, the conservative Die Welt and the centrist Die Zeit, every German newspaper and magazine followed the advice of Green Party co-leader Claudia Roth, who said "de-escalation begins at home," and erred on the side of caution by not republishing the cartoons. Prominent German psychoanalyst Horst-Eberhard Richter advised: "The West should refrain from any provocations that produce feelings of debasement or humiliation." Of course, Richter left open the question of whether "the West" should also refrain from the wearing of mini skirts, eating pork and the legalization of same-sex partnerships in order to avoid causing any feelings of debasement and humiliation in the Islamic world.
Had the Muhammed cartoons been reprinted by the whole German press, then newspaper readers could have seen for themselves how excessively harmless the 12 cartoons were and how bizarre and pointless the whole debate had become. Instead, the assessment was left to "experts" who had in the past defended every criticism of the pope and the Church as well as every blasphemous piece of art in the name of freedom of opinion, but who, in the case of the Muhammad cartoons, suddenly held the view that one must take other people's religious feelings into consideration.
But that argument was clearly just an excuse, a way of excusing the fact they had been silenced by fear. After all, a few things had happened in the time between the Rushdie affair and the caricatures debacle: 9/11, the London bombings, Madrid, Bali, Jakarta, Djerba -- events which some commentators have also interpreted as a reaction by the Islamic world to its degradation and humiliation by the West. Against this threat, it seemed more reasonable and, above all, safer, to show respect to religious feelings rather than insist on the right to freedom of expression.
Right to Offend More Important than Protecting the Offended
Very few people showed a willingness to break ranks. Among them was comedian Rowan Atkinson ("Mr. Bean"), who in the context of a debate over British proposed incitement of religious hatred legislation, declared that "right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended." And Somalia-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a secular Muslim woman then living in the Netherlands, responded with a manifesto that began with the words: "I am here to defend the right to offend."
But she was one of the few exceptions. Even the then-French president, Jacques Chirac, temporarily forgot that he represented the country of Sartre, Voltaire and Victor Hugo, and decreed that "anything that could offend the faith of others, especially religious beliefs, must be avoided."
Thus began the "de-escalation" that had been called for. The only problem is the other side isn't thinking about de-escalation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie is still in effect, and the attempt to murder Kurt Westergaard last week wasn't the first attempt to carry out a death sentence for an instance in which no crime had been committed. Islam may be the "religion of peace" in theory, but it looks different in practice.
A German-Turkish lawyer who lives in central Berlin recently had to go into hiding because she became the recipient of death threats after publishing a book. The tome doesn't include any caricatures of Muhammad. It's just the title that serves as a provocation: " Islam Needs a Sexual Revolution."
RELATED SPIEGEL ONLINE LINKS:
- Muhammad Cartoonist Targeted: US Indicts Two for Plot to Attack Danish Newspaper (10/28/2009)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,657794,00.html - German-Turkish Author Seyran Ates: 'Islam Needs a Sexual Revolution' (10/13/2009)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,654704,00.html - Back to the Drawing Board: Danish Muhammad Cartoonist Returns with New Work (11/12/2008)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,589954,00.html - Interview with Muhammad Cartoonist Westergaard: 'The Cartoon Must Not Be Used Against Muslims as a Whole' (03/28/2008)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,544052,00.html
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Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH
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