Bibi — now there’s a guy who can give a kick-arse speech! He’s is Israel’s Ronald Reagan. He’s the Jewish Gipper!

[Benjamin Netanhayu] So now here is the question. You have to ask it. If the benefits of peace with the Palestinians are so clear, why has peace eluded us? Because all six Israeli Prime Ministers since the signing of Oslo accords agreed to establish a Palestinian state. Myself included. So why has peace not been achieved? Because so far, the Palestinians have been unwilling to accept a Palestinian state, if it meant accepting a Jewish state alongside it.

You see, our conflict has never been about the establishment of a Palestinian state. It has always been about the existence of the Jewish state. This is what this conflict is about. In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews said yes. The Palestinians said no. In recent years, the Palestinians twice refused generous offers by Israeli Prime Ministers, to establish a Palestinian state on virtually all the territory won by Israel in the Six Day War.

They were simply unwilling to end the conflict. And I regret to say this: They continue to educate their children to hate. They continue to name public squares after terrorists. And worst of all, they continue to perpetuate the fantasy that Israel will one day be flooded by the descendants of Palestinian refugees.

My friends, this must come to an end. President Abbas must do what I have done. I stood before my people, and I told you it wasn’t easy for me, and I said… “I will accept a Palestinian state.” It is time for President Abbas to stand before his people and say… “I will accept a Jewish state.”

Those six words will change history.

“The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.” — Barack Obama, 5/19/11.

The statement above by the president is a rather simple sentence that to the layman and amateur no doubt sounds innocuous enough, but in reality goes against more than 50 years of bipartisan United States policy. It is one thing to declare the 1967 borders as an eventual goal, and quite another to declare it a starting point for peace. Perhaps after 100 years of peace, without rockets striking its citizens, Israel could agree to such borders. But today? Ridiculous. It’s suicide.

If the president’s statement was unintended it underscores his administration’s lack of foreign policy credentials. Worse, if the statement was calculated, it undermines that region’s only true liberally-constitutional democracy on the eve of a United Nations vote to recognize — albeit nonbinding — Palestinian statehood.

Indeed, that’s the first and foremost reason why Israelis today are feeling alienated by the Obama administration: his timing. The UN is perpetually, vigorously and disproportionately adopting measures against Israel. Why now give them excuse to blame unrest on borders? (A study in 2004 found that the UN Commission on Human Rights had condemned Israel 26 different times while not a single Arab state had ever been condemned. Israel has never been a member of UN Security Council, while 16 different Arab states have. Examples go on and on).

Understand what Obama did a few days ago — in a speech, an otherwise good speech, attempting to point out the Arab Spring, emphasizing the importance of bringing liberty and democracy to that region, voicing admiration and support for protesters from Syria to Egypt to Bahrain — Obama unwittingly or not gave the Arab states and its UN sympathizers a just cause to instead blame all that region’s problems on Israel by dictating an impossible condition for peace!

Furthermore, by stating — as American policy, mind you — that the United States believes the starting point to peace are the pre-1967 borders (a.k.a. the Green Line) it gives Palestinian terrorist groups the green light to reply with potential violence to any concession by Israel short of that unrealistic measure.

And it is unrealistic. It is also, more on point, irrelevant to peace!

After all, the idea of Middle East peace presupposes that all parties want peace, does it not? Given the number of foreign Arab and Islamic governments providing terror groups with cash for killing Israelis its reasonable to ask who wants peace in the Middle East beyond Israel and the West.

Were the solution for Middle Eastern peace as simple as returning to 1966 borders Israel would do it in a heartbeat. But people who believe that the Green Line border should be the starting point ignore a basic truth: For 20 years, from 1948 until 1967 Israel was repeatedly attacked by Arab states and non-state terror groups alike. So therefore, why would one ever think that the 1967 border matters?

Rather, it is the very existence of Israel that is the unjustified impetus of their violence. The ruling party in the Palestinian Territories, Hamas, has stated explicitly in its Charter/Constitution the God-ordained murder of Jews and destruction of the state of Israel replaced with an Islamic state: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory). Hamas Charter Article 7 adds, “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” Their charter is filled with anti-Semitic hate speech.

Likewise, the leaders of Hezbollah and other Arab terror groups have frequently stated that “Palestine” consists of “all the land from the river [Jordan] to the sea [Mediterranean].” That is Israel!

So, imagine if Canada’s constitution called for the destruction for the United States, or if the Mexican constitution called for the murder of non-Hispanic persons in all of North America? How more serious would we view security? Now, imagine if the Canadian and Mexican populations outnumbered the US population 150 million to 6 million. And imagine if they had repeatedly attempted invasion of Israel and continued to hurl rockets at its citizens. How might we react to our supposedly biggest ally’s president stating we need return to an indefensible border in places just 10 miles wide — half the width of the Washington beltway?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu retorted with reality, this which most reasonable Westerners, Obama included, understand: “Events in the region [all the recent protests] are opening people’s eyes to a simple truth: The problems of the region are not rooted in Israel.” Indeed. But Obama’s words nonetheless are digested by the masses of ignorance across the world, and those that would seek to use Israel as the Middle Eastern whipping boy.

“Why has peace eluded us?” explained Netanyahu this week:

“Because so far, the Palestinians have been unwilling to accept a Palestinian state if it meant accepting a Jewish state alongside it. You see, our conflict has never been about the establishment of a Palestinian state. It has always been about the existence of the Jewish state. This is what this conflict is about. … President Abbas must do what I have done. I stood before my people, and I told you it wasn’t easy for me, and I said… “I will accept a Palestinian state.” It is time for [Palestinian] President Abbas to stand before his people and say… “I will accept a Jewish state.” Those six words will change history.”

But now for the final sad truth, and Bibi Netanyahu knows this, as does Obama — Mahmoud Abbas is far too weak a leader to stand up to Hamas, and therefore as long as he rules there will be no peace.

Even now the United States military and other Western powers are deploying ships and other assets around the Med and near Libya. But posturing aside the National Review editors advocate a different kind of military strategy — do nothing. Here’s why:

We understand and share the impulse to stanch the killing. But there are two problems with the proposed no-fly zone.

One, Qaddafi’s regime doesn’t appear to be doing much of its murder from the air. If we are serious about limiting his ability to massacre his countrymen, the no-fly zone would have to become a no machine-gun zone, too — in other words an honest-to-goodness military intervention to affect events directly on the ground. Deploying our air power while Qaddafi continued to kill with impunity would make us look more ineffectual rather than less. For now (perhaps this will change if Qaddafi begins to consolidate his position on the strength of his air force), the no-fly zone seems a classic case of looking for lost keys under the streetlight; it’s the handiest way for us to intervene, not the most effective.

Two, the rebels are on the ascendancy. Absent some drastic change in the tide of events, it looks as if they will prevail. Why would we taint what would be the indigenous glory of their ouster of Qaddafi with an almost entirely symbolic Western military action? The reason that the revolts of 2011 have had a dramatic catalyzing effect across the region, when the invasion of Iraq didn’t, is that they are the handiwork of Middle Eastern populations themselves, and thus a much more appealing model of change.

This is a very interesting approach and something to be taken seriously, simply because we have used this strategy before successfully — In Poland, it was the tipping point for Communism.

As reported in Time Magazine in 1992, Reagan Republicans joined with The Vatican and Pope John Paul II, the AFL-CIO and other lefty labor movements to defeat the greater evil of Communism. One wonders if such cooperation for such a just cause and with such far-reaching consequences will ever be witnessed again.

Tons of equipment — fax machines (the first in Poland), printing presses, transmitters, telephones, shortwave radios, video cameras, photocopiers, telex machines, computers, word processors — were smuggled into Poland via channels established by priests and American agents and representatives of the AFL-CIO and European labor movements. Money for the banned union came from CIA funds, the National Endowment for Democracy, secret accounts in the Vatican and Western trade unions.

Replace the technology of the 1980s with today’s — cell phones and generators, webservers and Twitter and Facebook — but the concept is the same. (On second thought, if the illiberal regimes of the Arab world focus on blocking modern technology, what if the populations did utilize the old technologies — would the dictators see that coming before it was too late?)

Of course, we’ll never know, at least for many years to come, how much or how often our intelligence services employ asymmetrical support to the world’s enemies of freedom and liberty. I’d like to think it occurs often, but given that the only leaks of our intelligence services time and again seem to indicate a climate of inaction and risk aversion, it may be that we’ll never see the West support an Arab or Islamic “Solidarity” movement.

Great commentary from the Bret Stephens:

It’s what the good people on West 40th Street like to call a “Times Classic.” On Feb. 16, 1979, the New York Times ran a lengthy op-ed by Richard Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton, under the headline “Trusting Khomeini.”

“The depiction of [Khomeini] as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false,” wrote Mr. Falk. “What is also encouraging is that his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals.”

After carrying on in this vein for a few paragraphs, the professor concluded: “Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics, Iran may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third-world country.”

Whoops.

The Times is at it again. Last week, the paper published an op-ed from Essam El-Errian, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Guidance Council, who offered this soothing take on his organization: “We aim to achieve reform and rights for all: not just for the Muslim Brotherhood, not just for Muslims, but for all Egyptians.” Concurring with that view, Times reporter Nicholas Kulish wrote on Feb. 4 that members of the Brotherhood “come across as civic-minded people of faith.”

… “We think highly of a country whose president is important, courageous and has a vision, which he presents in the U.N., in Geneva, and everywhere,” the Brotherhood’s Kamal al-Hilbawi told Iran’s Al-Alam TV earlier this month, referring to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust and 9/11 denials. “We think highly of a country . . . that confronts Western hegemony, and is scientifically and technologically advanced. Unfortunately, these characteristics can be found only in the Islamic Republic of Iran. I hope that Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia will be like that.”

Nor should there be any doubt about what the Brotherhood is aiming against. “Resistance is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny,” Muhammad Badie, the Brotherhood’s supreme guide, sermonized in October. “The improvement and change that the [Muslim] nation seeks can only be attained . . . by raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.”

Such remarks may come as a rude shock to James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence who last week testified in Congress that the Brotherhood was “largely secular” (a remark his office later retracted). They may also surprise a coterie of Western analysts who are convinced that the Brotherhood is moving in a moderate direction and will only be further domesticated by participation in democratic politics. Yet the evidence for that supposition rests mainly on what the Brotherhood tells Westerners. What it says in Arabic is another story.

In 2005, candidates for the Brotherhood took 20% of the parliamentary vote. Gamal al-Banna, Hassan’s youngest brother, once told me they command as much as 40% support. Neither figure is a majority. But unless Egypt’s secular forces can coalesce into serious political parties, the people for whom Islam is the solution won’t find the fetters of democracy to be much of a problem.

Here’s Michelle Malkin:

Every day is a Western flag-burning day somewhere in the Muslim world for every reason under the sun (see here here here here here and here, for starters).

Koran-burning isn’t the real “provocation.” Or Mohammed cartoons. As I’ve said many times over the years, the mere existence of infidels is what provokes and inflames the Religion of Perpetual Outrage. Retaliating against Koran-burners or targeting cartoonists is a lingering pretext to demonstrate that centuries-old, Koran-inspired hatred. If it isn’t cartoons, it’s always something else. From fresco rage to book rage to film rage to beauty pageant rage to Koran-dropping rage to cartoon rage to Pope rage, to ceramic Mohammed bobblehead rage to teddy bear rage to Burger King ice cream cone rage to blasphemous soccer ball rage, it never ends.

They never forget and they never forgive. Which is why we must never submit.

It’s not just flags, but Christians too: [June 2007] — Christians in Gaza Fear for Their Lives as Muslims Burn Bibles and Destroy Crosses. Other than a few words of “we regret this act” blah, blah, blah by the politically correct Western governments, there is no response to this or any of the above acts. And so, the West must reap what it sows. If the West cannot issue stronger words than a few regrets, then why should moderate Muslims — under threat of violence in many countries — do so? Where is the leadership?

Well, at least a few journalists are doing their jobs and finding previously published words of the proposed-WTC mosque backer, Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf. Here’s the WSJ:

In a letter published on November 27, 1977, Mr. Rauf commented on Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic trip to Israel and encouraged his fellow Muslims to “give peace a chance.” That John Lennon lyric sounds good. But he added: “For my fellow Arabs I have the following special message: Learn from the example of the Prophet Mohammed, your greatest historical personality. After a state of war with the Meccan unbelievers that lasted for many years, he acceded, in the Treaty of Hudaybiyah, to demands that his closest companions considered utterly humiliating. Yet peace turned out to be a most effective weapon against the unbelievers.”

He’s referring to a treaty in the year 628 that established a 10-year truce between the Prophet Muhammad and Meccan leaders and was viewed by Muslims at the time as a defeat. But Muhammad used that period to consolidate his ranks and re-arm, eventually leading to his conquest of Mecca. Imam Rauf seems to be saying that Muslims should understand Sadat’s olive branch in the same way, as a short-term respite leading to ultimate conquest.

To drive that point home, he added in the same letter that “In a true peace it is impossible that a purely Jewish state of Palestine can endure. . . . In a true peace, Israel will, in our lifetimes, become one more Arab country, with a Jewish minority.”

Nice, eh? There’s more at the link.

It’s reminiscent of a quote, the author whom I cannot remember, who basically stated, “If the Palestinians unilaterally disarmed tomorrow there would be peace and their own state. If the Israelis unilaterally disarmed tomorrow there would be no Israel or Jews remaining.” Time and again so many “moderate” Islamist political figures say one thing to the West but hide their true feelings when the spotlight is upon them.

Be sure to check out Tom Gross’ Mideast Dispatch Analysis and his coverage of a new mall opening in Gaza. Let’s just say it’s a far cry from the typical Lamestream media reports about the impoverished in Gaza. Here’s an excerpt worth highlighting:

“On a day when (because EU Foreign Policy Chief Baroness Ashton is in Gaza) the BBC and other media have featured extensive reports all day long on what they term the dire economic situation in Gaza, why are they not mentioning the new shopping mall that opened there yesterday?

“When leading news outlets mention the so-called humanitarian flotillas from Turkey, why do they omit the fact that life expectancy and literacy rates are higher, and infant mortality rates are lower in Gaza than corresponding rates in Turkey? Have they considered that perhaps the humanitarian flotillas ought to be going in the other direction, towards Turkey?”

In Turkey, life expectancy is 72.23 and infant mortality is 24.84 per 1,000 births.

In Gaza, life expectancy is 73.68 and infant mortality is 17.71 per 1,000 births.

Turkey has a literacy rate of 88.7% while in Gaza it is 91.9%. (It is much lower in Egypt and other Arab countries where Israel did not establish colleges and universities in the 1970s and 1980s.)

Gaza’s GDP is almost as high as Turkey’s and much, much higher than most of Africa that gets 1,000th of the aid per capita that Gaza gets from the West. (Source for above info: CIA World Factbook)

World hunger organizations report that 10-15 million children below the age of 5 die each year, and 50,000 people die daily. One-third of all deaths in the world are due to poverty.

While famine kills millions of children in Africa, India, and elsewhere, life expectancy for Gaza Arabs, at 72 years, is nearly five years higher than the world average. In Swaziland, for example, life expectancy is less than 40 years, and it is 42 years in Zambia.

Meanwhile Western governments, misled by Western media, continue to pour more and more money into Gaza for people that don’t need it, while allowing black Africans to starve to death.

As the correspondent for one of Japan’s biggest newspapers said to me last week, “Gaza and the West Bank are the only places in the world where I have seen refugees drive Mercedes.”

First, some great recollection of history by the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, for the world’s Helen Thomases. The recently retired friend of moral equivalence and relativism, Helen Thomas, left in shame last week after a candid moment in which she explained on video how she’d promote Middle East Peace: “Tell them [Jews in Israel] to get the hell out of Palestine. … Go home. Poland. Germany. And America and everywhere else.”

Well, I don’t know about “everywhere else,” but after World War II, many Jews did attempt to “go home” to Poland. This resulted in the murder of about 1,500 of them — killed not by Nazis but by Poles, either out of sheer ethnic hatred or fear they would lose their (stolen) homes.

The mini-Holocaust that followed the Holocaust itself is not well-known anymore, but it played an outsized role in the establishment of the state of Israel. It was the plight of Jews consigned to Displaced Persons camps in Europe that both moved and outraged President Truman, who supported Jewish immigration to Palestine and, when the time came, the new state itself. Something had to be done for the Jews of Europe. They were still being murdered.

In the Polish city of Kielce, on July 4, 1946 — more than a year after the end of the war — rumors of a Jewish ritual murder triggered a pogrom in which 42 Jews were killed. All were Holocaust survivors. The Kielce murders were not, by any means, the sole example of why Jews could not “go home.” When I visited the Polish city where my mother had been born, Ostroleka, I was told of a Jew who survived Auschwitz only to be murdered when he tried to reclaim his business. In much of Eastern Europe, Jews feared for their lives.

That’s great history by Cohen.

Just one retort, however, counters Jonah Goldberg — it seems Mr. Cohen hasn’t always been intellectually honest himself:

I really liked Richard Cohen’s column today on Helen Thomas, in which he makes it sound as if he thinks Thomas is 100 percent wrong. But it’s kind of hard to square with this Cohen column from a few years ago. In his July 16, 2006, Washington Post column, Cohen wrote:

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.

“Draw a cartoon or write a novel offending Islam, and you must go into hiding; defame Jews and earn accolades.” — Victor Davis Hanson.

“The consequence of this moral and cultural relativism is that people are increasingly unable to make moral distinctions based on behavior. Such moral equivalence rapidly mutates into moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a “victim” group while those at the receiving end of their behavior are blamed simply because they belong to the “oppressive” majority. This is on repeated display over a wide range of domestic issues such as family breakdown, drug abuse and the various demands of the “victim culture,” including the response to examples of Muslim aggression. …There is a tendency to equate and then invert the behavior of the perpetrators of violence and that of their victims, so that self-defense is misrepresented as aggression while the original violence is viewed sympathetically as understandable and even justified.” — Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan.

Well said Victor and Melanie! Indeed, whenever the topic turns to Israel and Palestine one finds the masses of conventional “wisdom” become the harbingers of extreme irrationality.

Example number one came from Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who in the wake of activist aggression resulting in 9 dead labeled it “Turkey’s 9-11.” Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up. Sure, numb skull, it’s just like 9-11, except 3,000 or so less dead and instead of hijacked airplanes flown into buildings it was a lawful attempt to search for terrorist supplies. After all, when it comes to terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas have used Red Crescent ambulances to ferry arms and militants and international commercial shipping to deliver weapons. No other country but Israel would be expected to put up with such nonsense. But nonsense is precisely what we get from closet anti-Semites in Turkey.

Throughout Europe the typical cry that Israel acted “disproportionately” continues. It makes one wonder what the heck Europe would consider “proportionate.” This is the same world community that, as Victor Hanson above retorts, said virtually nothing when North Korea sunk a South Korean ship (an act of war) a few weeks ago, or when Russia put its boot on the neck of Grozny, or nowhere near “the scale of violence, given what we see hourly in Pakistan, Darfur, and the Congo.”

How’s this for proportionate:

Israel (foolishly) withdrew from Gaza years ago, ceding control to Hamas, which proceeded to launch thousands of rockets into Israel. Israel then enacted this blockade for self defense, simultaneously pitying the residents of Gaza from their elected terrorist leaders by delivering food and supplies, “including [from just January to March alone] 48,000 tons of food products; 40,000 tons of wheat; 2,760 tons of rice; 1,987 tons of clothes and footwear; and 553 tons of milk powder and baby food” to the very Palestinians trying to kill them and destroy their state.

As columnist Mona Charen reminded, Israel (1) asked the flotilla organizers to deliver to a predetermined port first for inspection, but were refused, (2) ignored Israeli Navy requests to change course, (3) and boarded with only the minimally-defensive weaponry, including a single pistol for each soldier, the primary weapon being a paintball gun. In return (4) the “activists,” which included members of a group with known ties to Hamas and other global jihad terrorist groups, and who seemed fully prepared and preordained for violence and martyrdom, complete with chanted references to a massacre of Jews in Arabia by Muhammad, (5) began to beat the Israelis with metal rods, knifes, tossed stun grenades, and possibly fired guns.

Were it not obvious enough that the intentions had nothing to do with “relief” for Palestinians, today (6) refused the supplies Israel detained from the blockade, our NATO “ally” Turkey appears to have officially sealed a “strategic alliance between Turkey, Iran, and Syria,” notably detailed by Seth Cropsey. There’s a reason why Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan told his parliament that “today is a turning point in history. Nothing will ever be the same again.” (7) This wasn’t a reaction by Turkey to Israel, it was a proactive decision. Their plan was to provoke a response, and that’s exactly what they got.

One day, however, Turkey might wish it hadn’t made a deal with the devil in Iran.