Apparently all it takes to be a "moderate" in the Middle East is not to say that you want to kill Jews and destroy Israel in English. It's the soft bigotry of low expectations all over again! Anyway, Mahmoud Abbas said some fairly nasty things about Israel. TW2 doesn't know what they were, but they seem to involve violence, not recognizing the Zionist state, stuff like that. What I do know is that he said it in Arabic, just like MOST of the Palestinian leaders do when they want to reassure their constituents that all that stuff about getting rid of NAFTA--check that, cooperating with Israel--is just a ruse. (It's kind of like the Navajo wind talkers, except we actually know Arabic. So...it's a like a secret code for use against willfully ignorant people. Your tax dollars at work! Seriously, as you'll see.) But Abbas actually got caught, thanks to the Palestinian Media Watch.
President Bush, zealously following Clinton's traditional Presidential Roadmap to Peace (TM)--where the rest stops have two lanes, one marked "American Officials" that leads to a place with vending machines and bathrooms and one marked "Israeli People" that leads out into oncoming traffic on Intifada Route 3--has asked for millions of your dollars to go to the Palestinian Authority, Abbas's outfit. If you can't trust an organization with a history of using aid ambulances to hide terrorists, whom can you trust?
In all seriousness, it is imperative that we stop negotiating with people who have no intention of coming to a real compromise. Our history of mediation between Israeli officials willing to agree to enormously sacrificial deals and Palestinians who reject them outright or accept them only to break their agreement the following week has been a fiasco for long enough. No more Nobel Prizes for murderers like Arafat and Abbas; only isolation and defeat.
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