{"id":1357,"date":"2006-03-19T13:11:29","date_gmt":"2006-03-19T17:11:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=1357"},"modified":"2006-03-19T13:11:29","modified_gmt":"2006-03-19T17:11:29","slug":"realities-like-that-just-cant-be-spun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=1357","title":{"rendered":"Realities like that just can’t be spun."},"content":{"rendered":"

The hearing held by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations<\/a> on 15 March 2006, Post-Palestinian Election Challenges in the Middle East (video<\/a>), provides several examples of the intransigent deception and chronic injustice that would have prevailed no matter who the Palestinians elected. The question posed by committee chairman Sen. Richard Lugar to Mr. Robert Malley, Middle East and North Africa Program Director of the International Crisis Group, D.C., was one of the more absurd moments.<\/p>\n

Sen. Lugar asks [2:31:16], “How would you respond to an American citizen who took a look at this in a common sense way, doesn’t claim to be sophisticated or having been involved in the Middle East but simply notes that Israel, as I think Ambassador Ross suggested, is prepared to say we will finish the wall, we’ll finish the separation, we’ll withdraw certain settlements, but we’re prepared to retain our sovereignty and our (entity?), it’s not going to be an existential event for us, we’re going to continue on. Now, whatever happens on the other side of the wall is the business of whoever’s over there. Now, United States citizens may say, well we just can’t leave it at that. These folks really don’t know how to get along, and we’ve been trying to help them, and we want to ameliorate the difficulties and problems and so forth. But sceptics might say, why not just leave it that way for a while? In other words, if in fact, the Palestinian government, however it evolves with Hamas, Fatah, whoever, comes to the United States and says we would like to have your help, we would like to have a programme, why then we might respond to this as opposed to our going to them and saying, now by and large we don’t like really what’s happened here but we want to do this little humanitarian aid just because we don’t want to see suffering people, we’d like to throw a little food in there, maybe even a little democracy movement sort of behind the scenes, sort of help you folks out in your revolution. And then, at that point Hamas or others say, there go the Americans again meddling in our situation, if we fail it’s them. Even while we’re trying to do good, meaning we’re backward! Now, how do you respond to that rather common sense type of questioning that some of us get from our constituents who don’t attend these hearings, who don’t hear experts, who wonder why in the world are we expending this amount of effort with regard to a group that we don’t think is a very good group as it stands, and who we ask to reform, but we understand as you said this takes time, maybe a lot of time, not only intermediate but maybe long term, maybe only nuanced by acceptance of Arab League principles or some other way that we explained. That’s what they really mean but they can’t say it, they don’t want to do it. How do you respond to this common sense inquiry?”<\/p>\n

Because Mr. Malley works for an organisation whose purpose is to smooth the rough edges of illegal U.S. foreign policy, he praised the common sense of Americans before going on to caution it’s a bit too soon to come out of the closet with that position. The fear is that violence will “bleed into Israel” if the interim period between the Hamas and Israeli elections isn’t handled more diplomatically. If Mr. Malley was an independent analyst who advocated human rights he might have said, Sen. Lugar, Your constituents would be better served if they finally consulted the opinions of experts rather than depend upon your expertise since you are clearly misinformed. The implementation of the unilateral actions that Israel is planning would be in clear violation of international laws. If the U.S. continues to aid and abet such measures it will be rightly judged by any fair minded witness to be complicit in those crimes. <\/p>\n

Of course, if Mr. Malley was an independent analyst and not a hired thug he’d have never been invited to testify before a committee which at best will cool its heels until after the Israeli elections, when the hope for a Palestinian state will be crushed for good and their rhetorical exercises will scale unprecedented heights. <\/p>\n

Just after Malley claimed [2:44] that money the U.S. gave to the PA two days before the election<\/a> was “a lot of misinformation,” came a most revealing exchange between Sen. Lincoln Chafee and Dennis Ross.<\/p>\n

Sen. Chafee asks [2:46], “It seems to me as though if you can predict what’s going to happen, seems as though Kadima’s going to win and unilateral boundaries are going to be set, with from what I understand, complicity of the United States, that they’ve met with the United States and our government and we’re going to agree that, as Ambassador Ross said, there is going to be a divorce. But what does that mean? What are those boundaries going to look like? And does that preclude, if that occurs, a viable, contiguous Palestinian state? Is the reality that once these boundaries are set there will be no Palestinian state, Ambassador Ross?”<\/p>\n

Ross’ smile was as cheap as his haircut. <\/p>\n

The coming Pax Americana<\/em><\/a> by Efraim Halevy, the former chief of the Mossad and the national security advisor to Ariel Sharon who opposed the “disengagement” from Gaza, made painfully clear to anyone with the ability to read that this foul plan has been in the works all along. Israel is vehemently opposed to the Arab League principles that Ross and Malley deceptively claim Hamas is far from recognising. Halevy participated in a Q & A session hosted by Ha’aretz<\/em><\/a> in May ’05 and seemed to be implicitly threatening the U.S. to stay true or else. But does the U.S. really need convincing? Stephen J. Sniegoski called Halevy’s piece<\/a> “an example of what the great revisionist historian Harry Elmer Barnes classified as a “smother-out.” The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing was nothing less. <\/p>\n

Donald Rumsfeld is now claiming that to leave Iraq would be like “handing Germany back to the Nazis<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

What to call the people who ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land<\/a> and rob Iraqis of their resources?<\/p>\n

Realities like that just can’t be spun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The hearing held by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on 15 March 2006, Post-Palestinian Election Challenges in the Middle East (video), provides several examples of the intransigent deception and chronic injustice that would have prevailed no matter who the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-lT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}