Hobby or Necessity?

Mr. Thomas Friedman wrote an article for the New York Times last month saying, for Israel, pursuing peace was more of a "hobby" than necessity.

(Thomas Friedman is a well known pundit in the USA and is often thought of as 'middle of the road' and a voice of reason on a variety of subjects and issues. I happen to agree, but not on Israel. No one with a pair of eyes and ears could agree with this assessment)

-Ask the 9,000 Jewish folks who were kicked out of their homes in Gaza in 2005 to make way for Arabs how much of a hobby peace has been for them. (Most of them have not been resettled into permanent residences)

-Ask the cities of Sderot and Ashkelon, bombarded by rockets with even more intensity starting in 2005 after Israel disengaged for peace. A grand total of over 5,700 rockets and 4,000 mortars have been fired at these desert communities. Ask their maimed children, dead spouses, or the hordes of little children forced to live in (or at all times be within 8 seconds of) bomb shelters about Israel's peace 'hobby.'

-Ask the Jews around the world who have felt a surge of Judeophobic violence since Operation Cast Lead in 2009. (Cast Lead was an operation by the IDF which was executed to stop the rocket fire from Gaza, the same Gaza Israel unilaterally withdrew from in 2005)

-Ask Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel in 2000 and current defense minister, who with President Bill Clinton, offered the Palestinians 92% of the West Bank, all of Gaza,  a capital in East Jerusalem, as well as an internationally funded (including Israel) aid package for the Palestinians to build their state. Arafat turned down this generous offer WITH NO COUNTEROFFER!!

-Ask Mahmoud Abbas, The Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority. Mr. Abbas told the Washington Post (Abbas's Waiting Game, by Jackson Diehl) that former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, offered him an even more generous offer than Arafat got in 2000, with a whopping 97% of the West Bank offered to the Palestinians. Abbas turned it down, he didnt like the borders.

In an effort to be Politically Correct, and using some kind of backwards moral equivalency, Mr Friedman doesnt see that it is plainly the Palestinians (or their leaders, more specifically) who treat peace as a hobby, if that.

SIDE NOTE:

The difference between the Palestinians and Israel: The Palestinians are not DESPERATE ENOUGH for their own state. The desperate post-Holocaust Jews even accepted a non-contiguous state in Palestine in 1948. Arabs chose war. This plays out over and over and over and again through history, with the Jews going to the table, and making sacrifices, with Arabs not even making the slightest of sacrifices, like ending the practice of naming Palestinian Streets after terrorists who committed attacks with civillian death tolls as high as 37.

If the Palestinians were desperate for independence like the Jews were, there would have been a state in 1948. Or 2000. Or in Gaza in 2005. Or with Olmert in 2009. Or after 1967, Or 73. The list goes on and on.

Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens making Mos Def look idiotic about Iran

 Mos Def- you are a brilliant rapper, but anything that comes out of your mouth resembles the substance i have to pick up after my dog every morning

Obama strikes new tone on terrorism, bans Islam, jihad from security terminology-

"You take a country where the overwhelming majority are not going to become terrorists, and you go in and say, 'We're building you a hospital so you don't become terrorists.' That doesn't make much sense," said National Security Council staffer Pradeep Ramamurthy.

If you build Israel a hospital, you are a hero to Israelis, no matter what disingenuous intentions lie within the philanthropic act itself (case in point; the donations to Israel from Christians who actively convert Jews in America). If you build a hospital for a Muslim country, its a spit in the face. What is with the hostility of the Muslim world? What is notable is that Obama employs a similair type of hostility when dealing with Israel.

The Obama Administration makes no attempts to pull punches aimed at Israel, yet at every turn Obama feels that the way we should treat the Muslim world is the way bad parents treat a spoiled kid, so careful not to anger them, never asking for even the smallest of concessions, quick to allay any percieved discomfort, no matter how trivial, while at the same time using a much harsher set of standards when dealing with others. The Obama administration refuses to name Radical Islam by name, although Radical Islamists kill our troops and civillians, but has no problem perpetuating the hideous myth that building in Jerusalem puts our troops in danger.

Obama met with Afghanistan's President Karzai after Karzai welcomed dubiously elected Iranian President Ahamadinejad in his country and gave him a platform to spew his Anti-American drivel. Despite this slap in the face to America, Obama flew to Afghanistan to have a public, camera-filled dinner with the corrupt Karzai, in stark contrast to the private, 'no cameras allowed' meeting Obama had with Netanyahu. Obama also kept Netanyahu waiting an hour and a half after meeting with him for 30 minutes to have dinner, a dinner Netanyahu was not invited to. Obamas treatment of Israel makes me want to puke, and the sad thing is, he is giving ammunition to all the voices who said he would be against Israel because of the Anti-Semetic vitrol he sat through for 20 years listening to Revered Wright. I consider myself extremely liberal on nearly all fronts, my vote in the primaries went to Hillary. The only thing that held me back from giving Obama my vote was the fear that Obama would give the Iranian wolves the keys to the Jewish henhouse, together with the fear that Obama would push Israel into more unilateral concessions in return for terror, even more so than his predecessors because of his Muslim heritage.

(SIDE POINT: Obama is a Muslim. This might be the un-PC thing to say, but he is a Muslim as much as my father is a Jew. In Islam, the father determines the religion, in Judaism, the mother. If my grandmother gave birth to my father, and afterwards promptly converted to Catholicism and raised my father as a Catholic, my father would still be considered a Jew by even the most stringent Jewish authorities. As I said, even if Obama doesn't consider himself a Muslim, the Muslim world does, and he is well aware of this.)

To take a page from the Reverend, Obama's chickens will 'come home to roost' if he doesnt stop this ill treatment of Israel. The American people are behind Israel, Congress is overwhelmingly behind Israel (Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner got together for some snapshots with Netanyahu during his visit here). Israel is an integral part of the USA's national security strategy, and together with Obama's percieved appeasement of Radical Islam, will create a picture for Obama's political foes that he is soft on terror. Perhaps they are right.

With all of George W's shortcomings, and the fiasco of Iraq, he had one thing right; we shoudlnt wait to be attacked. Obama is fine with fighting in Afghanistan, because 3,000 Americans were butchered by the Taliban's designs. 

Shall we wait to be murdered in our sleep/leisure time for the next time we fight back?