The Watcher’s Council has announced its picks for the most outstanding posts of the previous week. The winner in the Council post category was Wolf Howling’s “Waiting For The Iranian Shoe To Dropâ€. Second place honors went to Bookworm Room for “Predators and Prey”.
The winning non-Council post was The Augean Stables’s “What Do I Think of the Arab-Israeli Conflict? Answers to a Questionnaire”. Second place honors went to Kevin Mooney’s The Washington Examiner op-ed “ACORN got $53 million in federal funds since 94, now eligible for up to $8 billion more”.
The complete results can be found here.
That “Augean Stables” post is terrible. He points out that the Arab dictatorships bordering Israel treat Palestinian refugees like shit, and then argues that this means that the overall reason for Arab hostility to Israel has nothing to do with persistent issues like visible Palestinian suffering in and outside the Palestinian territories and everything to do with the “Jews” setting up a non-muslim state in “Dar al-Islam”. It’s total nonsense, of course; most of the arab population actually does give a shit about Palestinian suffering. It’s the governments in questions that by and large don’t, except as a political tool.
“Predators and Prey” is perfectly idiotic.
Obama is trying to get by on “cute?”
We’re continuing Predator attacks inside Pakistan, ramping up troops in Afghanistan, firing one general and replacing him with a general implicated in torture, threatening the British intelligence service and slow-walking a withdrawal from Iraq.
Yeah: cute, helpless.
This self-appointed Council aren’t terribly bright and getting ever less terribly bright. 9 times out of ten your post should win. You ever wonder if it’s time you ditched these losers?
Brett says ” It’s total nonsense, of course; most of the arab population actually does give a shit about Palestinian suffering. ”
Yeah, I guess that’s why they keep them in refugee camps for 60 years, don’t let them have jobs or integrate into their economies and I guess it’s also why the Egyptians keep their border locked down. It’s all because they hate to see Palestinain Arabs suffer. Right.
The one consistent belief of Arabs on the street throughout the 57 Arab states is that the rulers of those states face being overthrown and stand to lose their lives if they don’t hate Israel enough and show it by constant threats, ugly antisemitic rants and material support of terrorism launched from Gaza and the WB – which, guess what, causes most of Palestinain suffering – like the terrorist fence, the checkpoints, the periodic need to go after the terrorists in Gaza and the WB, etc.
I wonder how they’d treat the Palestinians if they didn’t give a shit about them and just wanted to use their “suffering” as justification for “ridding Palestine of Jews”. Oh wait . .
Michael, the Council has changed quite a bit, not entirely for the better, during my tenure there. Since the original Watcher left, in my view it has become systematically more partisan and more pro-Israeli. I view my continued participation there as a combination of inertia and educational.
If you had actually read my post rather than simply glance at it, you would have noticed that I made a distinction between the Arab population (who does give a shit) and the largely dictatorial governments in the area, which by and large don’t in so much as the suffering of the Palestinians doesn’t politically hurt them.
There aren’t 57 Arab states.
As I said, the Arab population by and large does give a shit about the Palestinians and their humiliation. And your last statement here is nonsense – most of Palestinian suffering comes from the fact that the Israelis do shit like cut off the flow of supplies and ghettoization.
Again, the “government vs people” distinction is important here.
Brett, Pls think about your comment above. Don’t just repeat common leftist rants. You say, for example, ” – most of Palestinian suffering comes from the fact that the Israelis do shit like cut off the flow of supplies and ghettoization.”
Are you suggesting that Israelis simply enjoy the suffering of the Arabs and that’s why they cut off their supplies and make them live in “ghettoes”?” Your statement is so stupendously lacking in any reasonable analytical content that it becomes almost impossible to consider as part of this, or any, discussion on the topic.
Certainly you are aware that after the Six Day War, Palestinians in the WB and Gaza experienced a large expansion of civil liberties and a period of economic growth surpassing all Arab states in the region. Educational institutions were built, etc. Standards of living, per capita income, infant mortality etc. saw huge improvements over conditions under Jordan and Egyptian rule. Why do think that happened? Because Isrealis wanted to make Palestinians’ lives miserable? Or does common sense indicate that Israelis were hoping for peaceful relations with their neighbors in the future and wanted to help them build a society worth preserving?
And why did Israel unilaterally leave the Gaza strip? And especially with millions of dollars worth of greenhouses in tact? To make Palestinians’ lives miserable? Or perhaps, to offer a chance to the Palestinians to show that they could become part of the solution to ME peace? To show that Palestinians could take that opportunity and govern themselves in a way to create a hopeful model for the WB where the threat of terrorist attacks were far more dangerous?
Stop with the leftist tropes and try to grasp the reality of the situation for what it is. Peace in the region is dependent on one thing only – Palestinain willingness to accept the existence of Israel and live in peace with Jews. Until that happens you’ll just have to keep on making up outlandish excuses for their actions – and good luck with that – because the world is starting to see the reality behind the sick propaganda.
Brett: (re: government vs people)
While Arabs states don’t have any real form of democracy, they do have something that is even more effective in assuring that government policy doesn’t stray too far from the Arab street. It’s called assassination and they’ve used it very effectively over the years. While this occasionally happens in Western nations too, even in Israel once, it does not determine state policy as these are aberrations, not statements of popular will.
In the West we have institutions such as parliaments, congresses and fair elections that take care of that. In Arab states, leaders are constantly under threat of violent overthrow from military officers and religious leaders who would cut their throats given the chance. One way they defend their throats is by constantly showing how they represent the “will of the people” who they purportedly lead.
The most obvious way for them to do this is to permit and even foment violent hatred of Israel and Jews and then move out front in the rhetoric with demands and promises never to make peace with the Jews. Would-be rivals justifiably fear harming a sufficiently popular Judeophobic leader as their necks would certainly be next. ME history is a continuous pattern of this cycle where virtually all state policy follows that principle – perhaps exemplified today by the Ahmedinijad regime in Iran. Remember that Fatah lost the election in Gaza and now faces further humiliation because they were/are not sufficiently antisemitic compared to Hamas.
A little realism regarding Arab culture would do you wonders. But then, that would make you see how far from reality your views actually are on the topic and so, that’s not very likely.