Posted on 08/31/2004 12:56:59 AM PDT by rmlew
Israel represents the synthesis of Pat Buchanan’s paranoid delusions -- rampant interventionism, neo-conservatives (his euphemism for Jews) in charge of the Bush’s foreign policy, American empire and a war on terrorism that can’t be won.
Thus, in his new book – "Where The Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency” -- all roads lead to Jerusalem.
In Buchanan’s fantasy world, were it not for America’s outrageously pro-Israel foreign policy, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar would be sending us anonymous love letters, the World Trade Center would still be standing, and the Moslem world would be singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” in unison, while Saddam Hussein (doing a passable imitation of Jimmy Cagney) tap-danced in the background.
Israel a la Pat is a homicidal, imperialist state – practicing apartheid, deliberately slaughtering civilians, occupying Palestinian land, and subjugating its peaceful inhabitants.
On page 240 of his book, Buchanan approvingly quotes Avraham Burg, who he identifies as a former speaker of the Knesset, concluding that Israel is a “thunderously failed reality,” that “rests on a scaffolding of corruption and on foundations of oppression and injustice.” According to Burg, “the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep.”
Pat somehow neglects to mention that Burg, the epitome of the self-loathing Jew, represents the far left of Israeli politics. An architect of the 1993 Oslo Accords, Burg is bitter because his handiwork (now seen as paving the way for the present jihad) has been overwhelmingly rejected by Israeli society.
In other words, Burg is as representative of Israel as Michael Moore is of America.
When it comes to terrorism, Pat practices a moral equivalency worthy of the most slavish Soviet apologists at the height of the Cold War.
Consider the following: “Sharon promised peace and security. Since his provocation on the Temple Mount in September of 2000, he has delivered war and hatred. Over 900 Israelis are dead. Some 3,300 Palestinians have died, including hundreds of children.”
His “provocation on the Temple Mount”? For an Israeli prime minister to visit Judaism’s holiest spot (where the First and Second Temples stood), in Israel’s sovereign territory, is a “provocation”? Besides, Sharon’s visit -- which was approved in advance by the so-called Palestinian Authority -- was a pretext for the violence, which was planned months in advance, as Palestinian leaders have since admitted.
Regarding those dead Palestinians and Israelis, Buchanan overlooks some significant details. Most of the dead Palestinians were fighters killed in confrontations with the Israeli Defense Force. Their civilian dead were overwhelmingly people caught in the crossfire, because brave Palestinian fighters usually choose to challenge the Israelis from civilian enclaves.
Most of the dead Jews were women, children and the aged -- elderly Holocaust survivors attending Passover seders, babes sleeping in their mothers arms, toddlers eating ice cream cones, families with small children taking a break at a pizzeria, shoppers boarding buses, 13-year-old boys dragged off to caves and stoned to death, etc.
There was the April murder of Gaza resident Tali Hatuel, who was riding with her four children (ages 2 to 11), when Arab snipers forced her car off the road. Pat’s precious Palestinians then walked up to the vehicle and shot each passenger at point-blank range. The mother, who was eight-months pregnant, was also shot in the stomach, to ensure that her unborn child didn’t survive. As a pro-lifer, Pat can certainly appreciate that touch.
For crowd control, the IDF uses rubber bullets. The Palestinians go in for bombs packed with flesh-shredding nails, laced with rat poison. As a result, between September 2000 (the start of the latest Intifada) and February 18, 2003, only 38 percent of Palestinian fatalities were noncombatants, compared to 77 percent of Israel’s dead.
Still, Pat gripes: “Sharon declared Arafat a ‘terrorist,’ i.e., a man with whom no Israeli can negotiate, though Arafat had negotiated with four of Sharon’s predecessors and shared a Nobel Peace Prize with two of them, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.”
Shared a Nobel Peace Prize? Oh, you mean like North Vietnamese Foreign Minister Le Duc Tho , who coped his with Henry Kissinger for negotiating the Paris Peace Accords – which led directly to the demise of South Vietnam, a string of tropical gulags and a million Vietnamese Boat People. If Pat has his way, Israel will follow South Vietnam in suicide through negotiations.
I liked Buchanan better when he didn’t sound so – French.
FYI, Sharon isn’t the only one who thinks Arafat is a terrorist – so do Bush, Cheney, Powell, Condoleezza Rice and everyone else except the gutless peace-at-any-price Europeans, and Pat Buchanan.
When it comes to Israel, Pat manages to pack more myths and misconceptions into a paragraph than anyone else I know. To wit:
Under the Sharon Plan, Israel will annex all five major settlements on the occupied West Bank. The Palestinian right of return is forfeit. Israel’s security wall will snake in and out of the West Bank. Jerusalem will not be shared with a Palestinian state.”
2) Right of Return – Even after the Palestinians get their state (and Israel gets indefensible borders), Buchanan still wants to see Israel flooded with 6 million refugees – those who left in 1948 and their descendants. If he had any intellectual honesty, he’d admit that this is a prescription for the end of Israel.
3) Security Wall – How inconsiderate of the Israelis to make it harder for suicide bombers to reach their targets! Buchanan has long advocated stationing US troops along our southern border, to prevent the infiltration of illegal aliens. If we have a right to keep out those seeking jobs (and we do), why doesn’t Israel have a right to block the entry of those seeking to blow things up? Ever hear of a Mexican suicide bomber?
4) Jerusalem will not be shared – Why stop at Jerusalem, Pat? Why not also give the Nobel laureate and his peace marchers a slice of Tel Aviv and Haifa, while you’re at it? Or, in fairness, why not give the Sephardic Jews driven from the Arab world in 1948, and their progeny, parts of Cairo, Baghdad and Tehran?
Still, Buchanan raves: “The Sharon Plan is not a peace plan. It is a unilateral solution to be imposed by Israel that no Arab nation will accept. A Palestinian leader who signs on to this surrender of land and rights would be signing his death warrant.” To surrender something, you have to be entitled to it in the first place, no?
Guess what, Pat? Even if Israel gave the Palestinians everything you believe to be theirs by right, it still wouldn’t buy peace – any more than surrender of the Sudentenland bought peace with Nazi Germany.
More than a decade after Oslo, the PLO charter still calls for the annihilation of Israel, as it did when Arafat was accepting his Nobel Peace Prize.
Even when he was pretending to be Israel’s partner in peace, Arafat was telling Arab audiences: We’ll take whatever the Jews are dumb enough to give us, and use it for a base to liberate the rest of Palestine. He even has a name of it – the Plan of Phases.
Without Judea and Samaria (AKA, the West Bank), Israel would be 9 miles wide at its narrow waist. Its eastern border would go from 40 miles to over 200 miles in length – impossible even for the Israeli Army to police. Arab tank columns, in a race to the sea, could cut the nation in half in hours. Controlling the high ground, Palestinians could rain mortar rounds and rockets on an area containing 80 percent of Israel’s population.
Don’t misunderstand me. The Sharon Plan is atrocious. Once the Palestinians have their state, they can begin importing heavy armaments and training commando units to act as an advance column for the rest of the Arab world when the next Middle East war comes – as come it will.
But the fact that Buchanan finds Sharon’s unilateral submission paltry and insufficient, and an insult to the noble Arafat and his heroic people, shows that Pat is either totally detached from reality or has an implacable, blinding hatred of the Jewish state that defies rational explanation. I think it’s a little of both.
Buchanan has constructed a worldview in which all of our troubles with Islam come down to a nation the size of Connecticut, devoid of resources.
I wonder if he ever asks himself why Moslems are killing Hindus in the Kashmir – because Sharon won’t share Jerusalem with Arafat? Or, why Moslems are murdering Christians in Indonesia, oppressing Christians in Egypt and committing genocide in the Sudan (a fact now even acknowledged by hard-core leftist Danny Glover)? Was the foregoing sparked by Sharon’s provocation on the Temple Mount?
Why is Saudi Arabia financing the building of militant mosques all over the United States, while signs in Riyadh proclaim “An Islamic World”? Perhaps the phenomenon is due to Israel’s security fence. Why are Kosovar Moslems burning down Orthodox churches, razing convents and slaughtering Serbs whenever they can lay their hands on them? Could this be a reaction to Neoconservative control of US foreign policy?
Like the Oxford students in the 1930s, who signed petitions vowing they’d never fight for king and country, like the America-Firsters under Charles Lindbergh (who Buchanan reveres), Pat is blind to any reality that threatens to intrude on his cozy, isolationist worldview.
Where The Right Went Wrong is dedicated to Ronald Reagan.
Would you care to know what a real conservative – the greatest conservative of the 20th. century – thought of the Jewish state?
In October 1980, Reagan called for “an undivided Jerusalem” under Israeli sovereignty. In the same speech, he declared, “I believe in the right of settlements in the West Bank.”
In April 1978, Reagan observed, “The present (Carter) administration is dead wrong when it says Israel’s West Bank settlements are ‘illegal.’”
In September 1980, the Gipper explained: “The touchstone of our relationship with Israel is that a secure, strong Israel is in America’s self-interest. Israel’s a major strategic asset to America. Israel is not a client but a very reliable friend.” That view did not change with the end of the Cold War.
In office, Reagan was forced to modify his position on what are called settlements. But he never changed in his opposition to a Palestinian state (“The United States will not support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.”), or his rejection of negotiations with Arafat and his PLO (who our 40th president consistently branded terrorists).
The man who won the Cold War envisioned Palestinians living in post-1967 Israel exercising a fair degree of autonomy, in some sort of loose federation with Jordan.
In his book, “Broken Covenant,” former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Moshe Arens disclosed, “Meeting President Reagan was like meeting an old friend, and he had a strong feeling of friendship and admiration for Israel that was always apparent in word as well as in deed.”
In light of the foregoing, who has betrayed the Reagan legacy – the neo-conservatives or Patrick J. Buchanan?
He may be holding out for Chomsky.
I am a gentleman. hmmmmmmmm...
Since his account is still up I assume it's simply a Keyes timeout.
Except when it comes to racists...hmmmmm
It sometimes offers strong indications of the poster's motivation or agenda.
I'm sympathetic to the Israelis, I'm "unabashedly" American.
Kerry as president scares all thinking rational people regardless of party.
Amen
I believe your qualifiers, thinking and rational, would explain why some of the third party types still don't get it.
I wish we could.
zacklee!
Oh.
understood.
And it has what to do with this thread?
Had my doubts before, but now I'm sure he's nutso.
Thanks.
(Even though I once in awhile weird out.. and frighten people..)
*chuckle*
Have fun, laugh well, see you on other threads at other times.
I find people who use Bio Pages to try and attack from, or use Bio Pages to flame or insult are lacking something and are trying to make up for some defect in their personality.
Now, what does a bio page have to do with this thread's subject?
Me too. .....but that has nothing to do with my question.
Actually,
I was really going to ask you if you wanted to start over and be freeper pals? I truly am a very nice person, a bit sensitive, but that's part of being a female :)You had hurt my feelings but that's water under the bridge...
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