The NYT Continues to Push Nonsense

The NYT continues to push nonsense

Posted: 09 May 2011 03:19 AM PDT
An editorial in the New York Times about the Hamas/Fatah unity agreement uses a couple of the usual NYT memes.

We have many concerns about the accord, starting with the fact that Hamas has neither renounced its legacy of violence nor agreed to recognize Israel. The Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, has said he remains in charge of peace efforts and the unity government will be responsible for rebuilding Gaza and organizing elections. Whether that is Hamas’s vision is unclear.

Also disconcerting are suggestions that Mr. Abbas may have privately agreed to replace his prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who has done so much to build up the West Bank economy and institutions. There are big questions about the future of the two sides’ security forces.

The United States has spent millions of dollars helping the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority create a security force that Israel has come to rely on to keep the peace in the West Bank. Whether Hamas, which has terrorized Israel with rockets from Gaza, can ever be integrated into that force, or even work side by side, is a huge question.

Israel certainly has many reasons to mistrust this deal. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suspended tax remittances and is pressing Washington hard to cut off aid to the Abbas government. The Obama administration has reacted warily to the new pact but said its assistance will continue for now. Congress is talking tough.

It’s too early for a cut-off. The money is Washington’s main leverage on the new government. A cut-off would shift the political balance dangerously toward Hamas.

If the US would have clearly warned the PA ahead of time that a government that does not meet the long-standing preconditions of the Quartet will lose all its foreign funding, all of the above problems would never have come up to begin with. Why should the world embrace Hamas now when we saw what happened last time they had "unity" - leading to Gaza turning into Hamastan?

Other reconciliation attempts between Fatah and Hamas have imploded, but Mr. Abbas seems to believe this will advance his push to get the United Nations General Assembly to recognize a Palestinian state. Above all, his sudden willingness to deal with his enemies in Hamas is a sign of his desperation with the stalled peace process.

No it isn't. It is proof that Abbas refuses to compromise with Israel and therefore is cunningly using the international community to accomplish by fiat the same goal without his being forced to tell his people that they will need to make concessions. There is no desperation here: just a very smart end-run around his making hard decisions.

Hamas’s goals are far harder to game, although there are reports of new frictions with Syria and a desire for better ties with Egypt’s new government.

The NYT covers world events, but cannot draw a line between the popular revolutions against authoritarianism in the Arab world and Gaza? Apparently, to the Times, the PA is an island of Western-style democracy in an ocean of Arab dictatorships.

In an interview with The Times last week, Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader, declared himself fully committed to working for a two-state solution. Just a few days earlier Hamas’s (supposedly more moderate) prime minister, Ismail Haniya, was out there celebrating Osama bin Laden as a “Muslim and Arab warrior.”

Hmmm. How can the New York Times resolve this seeming contradiction? Maybe it should go back and read Ethan Bronner's actual interview with Meshal, without Bronner's unprofessional and frankly dangerous assumptions, and discover that Meshal said no such thing!

Here's a rule to live by: When Hamas seems inconsistent between its words and actions, look for a loophole in their words. This is what a serious journalist must do, and it is something that the New York Times cannot seem to grasp vis a vis Palestinian Arab promises.

Huge skepticism and vigilance are essential. But more months with no progress on peace talks will only further play into extremists’ hands....

After Israel withdrew from Gaza, rocket attacks increased. After Israel killed some 750 Hamas terrorists in Cast Lead, rocket fire went down dramatically and Hamas started stopping other Gaza groups from firing rockets.

There were more suicide attacks in the immediate aftermath of Oslo - even before the second intifada - then there are today, after Israel went on the offensive to destroy the terror infrastructure in the West Bank.

Amazing how peace can result from war - another concept that the New York Times cannot grasp.

Washington needs to press Mr. Netanyahu back to the peace table. A negotiated settlement is the only way to guarantee Israel’s lasting security.

In the funhouse mirror image universe that the NYT resides in, it is Netanyahu who has refused to talk with Abbas, not the other way around. Their meme of an intransigent Likud leader is so ingrained that they cannot even get basic facts right.

The answer, to us, is clear. It is time for Mr. Obama, alone or with the quartet, to put a map and deal on the table. If Bin Laden’s death has given the president capital to spend, all the better. The Israelis and Palestinians are not going to break the stalemate on their own. And more drift will only lead to more desperation and more extremism.

The map and deal have been on the table before. The Palestinian Arabs rejected it, consistently. The Times' editors fantasies that Israel just needs to give a little more to obtain peace reflects nothing close to resembling reality.

But it does reflect that they believe Mahmoud Abbas' lies completely and uncritically. They believe he is a moderate, that he is willing to compromise, that his hands are tied, that he desperately wants peace with Israel. All of those assumptions - each demonstrably and provably false, as has been documented over the years - are what informs ridiculous NYT op-eds like these.

It certainly isn't based on fact.

(h/t David G)
Elder of Ziyon

Israel & Egypt Peace Treaty

“Egypt is not only our closest friend in the region,” Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a veteran Israeli politician and former defense minister known for his close ties to senior Egyptian officials, told Army Radio on Wednesday, “the cooperation between us goes beyond the strategic.”

Israeli officials and analysts said they believed that Mr. Mubarak’s government was strong enough to withstand the protests, at least as long as it had the backing of the Egyptian Army.

But with Mr. Mubarak, who came to power in 1981, now an ailing octogenarian, Israelis were in any case looking ahead to a transition of some sort in Egypt, amid a sense of a shifting regional equilibrium.

...

Israelis were not yet envisaging a future without the peace treaty with Egypt. Mr. Eran said that almost any government in Egypt would want to maintain the pact, even at a low profile, because so much is hinged on it, including Egypt’s relations with, and aid from, the United States.

At least in the short term, Israelis did not see a need for panic. At the same time, officials here were cautious about making long-term predictions. After Mr. Mubarak leaves the stage, one said, “We have no idea what will happen.”

Read the whole thing.

I wish I could share Eran's relative optimism. I can't. Most of Egyptian society - as Isabel Kershner points out in the Times - still hates us. It goes without saying that the Muslim Brotherhood would abrogate or ignore the treaty. But Egypt's great white hope - Mohamed ElBaradei - was known for his contempt of Israel when he was at the IAEA. The way I see it, we are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to Egypt, and any outcome is likely to leave us facing open hostility - or at least even less cooperation than exists today - to our south. And the answer to my "what can go wrong" question is "lots."

The fundamental problem is that although we made peace with the Egyptian leadership, we never made peace with the Egyptian people, who were left out of the process. That is true in Jordan as well, and as Palileaks has shown, it would be true if we made peace with the 'Palestinian Authority' today. In the long run, we are probably better off that Palileaks is the last nail in the coffin of the 'peace process' with the 'Palestinians.'

Labels: Cairo 25 January 2011, Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Hosni Mubarak, Jordan, Palileaks

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:44 AM