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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Hurst who wrote (12608)	12/3/2001 6:50:24 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

If you were the mother of those 5 kids would "regret" be enough? No. But the Palestinian attacks do not kill children by accident -- they target them deliberately, again and again and again. That is why it is terrorism. Now back to those two paragraphs from the Observer and internationalizing Jerusalem.... how does your Sudatenland example apply here and where is the appeasement? The appeasement lies in rewarding the PA's terrorist campaign. Surely it is obvious that you do not curb terrorism by rewarding it? Do you think we should have answered 9/11 by removing our troops from Saudi Arabia as bin Laden demanded? Give terrorism a success like that, and you will have bought only a brief respite until the locus of the dispute changes and the next campaign begins. The purpose of a terrorist campaign is to force brutal reprisals and polarize all positions. The intifada has succeeded here. No peace camp is going to survive a campaign of bombers from your erstwhile 'peace partner'. Oslo -- whose basic framework was 'Israel gets security and the Palestinians get a state' -- is dead. I think most of the responsibility (though not all) must be laid at Arafat's feet; he was bribed in every conceivable way accept a two-state solution, to be another Mandela. He turned out to be another Mugabe instead. He never discussed compromise even with his own corrupt government, much less his people, and he proved that his word is totally worthless, not once or twice, but thousands of times. He fostered the extremists and cried jihad in Arabic while mouthing the words of peace in English. He must go. Nor did Arafat act alone. The ceaseless incitement and money flowing from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Iran were a very great factor in preventing any deal. The Right in Israel predicted bitterly that Oslo would only be read as weakness in the Arab countries, would only revive the Arabs' hopes of destroying Israel altogether. And they were right. So before you go mouthing off about Israeli "tyranny" as they try desperately to keep their citizens from being blown up in their cities, consider who in the globe gives a good goddamn whether Israel survives or not, because that is the issue at stake. The Israelis know from bitter experience that when the mobs are in the streets shouting "Death to the Jews", war is only a matter of time. The Israelis know that they need some separation to let tempers cool. But this is absolutely impossible while Hamas and Islamic Jihad turn the territories into a mini-Taliban. With the Islamicists in control, this is not a border dispute, but an existential struggle. You cannot compromise with Hamas any more than with the Taliban. I don't know what will happen next. The Israelis may drive out Hamas, or the territories may descend into chaos. If we keep up our sabre rattling, Saddam Hussein may decide to change the equation by shooting chemical warheads at Tel Aviv. But the era of Arafat is just about over.