Tuesday 9 February 2010

The Saudi "Peace Initiative": a massive protection racket

The man called "Fat Tony", he come by you restaurant and he make you a offer cannot refuse -- "youse pay us: youse restaurant, she be protect" -- why, that seems like a pretty good deal, insurance you tell yourself.   So you pay your money and you get your protection.
I ask: what's the difference between Fat Tony's protection racket and what the Saudis offer in a so-called "peace" initiative?  I answer: the difference is that you can trust Fat Tony to keep his side of the bargain.
I wrote about the Saudi's 2002 "Peace" initiative to resolve the Palestine-Israel issue here .  Below is a quick recap straight from today's International Herald Tribune, the international edition of the New York Times, which continues, shamefully and shamelessly to tout this lousy "bargain"....

The rational approach to a durable Mideast peace is for President Obama and the Quartet — the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations — to take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict out of its bilateral context into a regional framework based on the 2002 peace plan of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia that all the Arab League States had endorsed. It calls for Israel’s complete withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders, the establishment of a viable Palestinian State on the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a fair settlement of the refugee problem in return for an unequivocal recognition of the state of Israel by all the Arab States and the normalization of relations among them. This offers a basis for a gutsy diplomatic activity that is more promising than a piecemeal approach. (from Samih Sherif in Switzerland)

The sum of this allegedly "gutsy diplomatic activity" is this: you give me your land and let me move my relatives into your house.  In return I don't kill you.  What a deal.  It gets worse: unlike the Mafia, you can't trust the Arab states to live up to their side of this "bargain", because Islam teaches that Islamic states, the waqf, can only ever, at most, have a "truce", not peace, with infidels and Jews.  And every truce is temporary.   Ask Hamas; it's in their Charter.
That's such a lousy deal that Israel, not noted for its stupidity, have wisely ignored it.  But it continues to rise up, like the zombies in the "Night of the Living Dead", eyeless and noisome, shuffling blindly through our lounge rooms, wrapped in the flapping, blood-stained bandages of the International Herald Tribune, and the Financial Times .
A detailed report in January 2010 by Just Journalism , which analyses all of last year's editorials in the Financial Times, reveals a consistent bias against Israel.  The FT touts the "peace" initiative of the House of Saud in no less than seven editorials.  Shame on them!