Yes, says Blair, the "Palestinians" have always been untrustworthy, but trust them anyway.
"Blair: Israel needs psychological shift," by David Horovitz for the Jerusalem Post (thanks to Steve):
Middle East envoy Tony Blair on Sunday urged Israel to make a "psychological shift" from indifference and skepticism about the prospects of progress with the Palestinians to an active determination to "make it happen on the right terms."He said Israel, which turns 60 in May, would "absolutely" still be here in another 60 years, but that "to guarantee its long-term security I believe it needs a viable Palestinian state."
If Israelis feel the same, Blair told The Jerusalem Post, then "the psychological shift that has to happen in the Israeli thinking is to move from saying, 'Well, if it happens, it happens, but frankly I'm skeptical about the whole thing,' to saying, 'Okay, I'm going to try and make it happen.'"
He said he was "sure that the Prime Minister [Ehud Olmert] is absolutely up for it. I've got no doubt about that at all. The next few weeks will tell whether everyone is prepared to get behind that."
At the same time, however, Blair stressed Israel should not "yield" at all on security. And he stopped short of expressing full confidence that the Palestinian leadership, under Mahmoud Abbas, was capable of carrying out the necessary reform to meet Israel's vital security needs.
It was "not impossible" for the Palestinians to transform themselves into the kind of "stable partner for Israel" that Jordan constitutes, he said. But the new Palestinian leadership is living "with a very long legacy from the past," Blair said, in a reference to the Yasser Arafat era. The question for Abbas and his colleagues was, "Do they break out of that whole mindset? Do they regard themselves as people who are going to take the risks, shoulder the responsibility and get it done or not?... All I say to Israelis," he went on, "is, well, put it to the test... What is the alternative?" Blair said he fully understood that Israel's mistrust of the Palestinian leadership was a consequence of bitter experience. Indeed, he had been telling critics of Israel that, in the light of what went wrong in the Oslo years and in the wake of the Gaza disengagement, he too, were he leading Israel, would be wary of dramatic territorial withdrawal and giving the Palestinians' statehood. "When you're saying to [Israel], 'We now want you to pull out of everywhere and give [the Palestinians] a state, you know, any of us who were in the shoes of the Israeli prime minister or any Israeli minister would be saying 'Whoa.'"
Yep.
Nonetheless, he went on, "the danger in this situation, if I can be very blunt about it, is that you say 'There have been 60 years of failure of negotiation and therefore it's always going to fail,' whereas actually sometimes things aren't like that. And to be fair to this Palestinian leadership, as I keep emphasizing, they're living with the legacy of a certain type of politics and you don't escape from that immediately."
The poor dears.
You know, nobody was giving the Adenauer government in West Germany passes in the 1950s because they were "living with the legacy of a certain type of politics."
"What is the alternative?"
.....a fight to the death...winner take all....
"And to be fair to this Palestinian leadership, as I keep emphasizing, they're living with the legacy of a certain type of politics and you don't escape from that immediately."
...The Palestinians do not want to escape form a legacy of a certain type of politics...they like their political history...and in fact, boast of it often....to bad people like Blair aren't listening....
That shallow flim-flam man, Tony Blair, is now doing what so many failed political leaders, especially Americans, have done before him: attempted to Make Peace, a Permanent Peace, between what used to be called Arabs and Jews, or Arabs and Israelis, but since the late 1960s, with malice aforethought, are carefully called Israelis and "Palestinians."
It has been six years since 9/11/2001. Like Bush, Blair spent the months just after 9/11/2001 telling his own public, and the world, how wonderful and peaceful and truly impressive Islam was and is, and told everyone that he carried around a copy of the Qur'an for reading and ready reference -- apparently all of Sura 9, and another 100 verses outside of Sura 9 (see the Calcutta Koran Petititon), escaped his notice. And what also escaped his notice was the "Sunnah" -- that is the Hadith, the stories that contain, supposedly, the record of what Muhammad said and did, stories that more than a thousand years ago were collected (within a few centuries there were many tens of thousands of them, because what else could people do but weave further stories out of the stories they knew?), and that were carefully collected and their chains of transmission, or isnad-chains, solemnly studied, to determine their likely authenticity, and then they were ranked accordingly, and those assigned the highest of the ranks, by the handful of most authoritative muhaddithin -- Bukhari and Muslim above all the rest -- are the Hadith that count the most. But does Blair know this? Does he know about the Hadith, and has he read, say, a few hundred of the best-known? Has he read, and thoroughly assimilated, the Muslim biographies of Muhammad? Does he understand the central role of Muhammad in the Muslim worldview, a role more important than that of Allah? Does he know that Muhammad is the Model of Conduct, uswa hasana, the Perfect Man, al-inan al-kamil? And if he does know that, what does he make of a billion Believers taking as their Model of Conduct, as their idea of a Perfect Man, someone who watched the mass killings of the bound prisoners of the Banu Qurayza, who greeted with pleasure news of the deaths of Asma bint Marwan (a woman who had merely composed a few mocking verses against him), and Abu Akaf, who raided and killed, and seized the women of, the inoffensive Jewish farmers quietly tilling the soil at the Khaybar Oasis, a raid that was conducted purely for the sake of that loot, and those women, and that became a model for subsequent Muslim raids on those who had done nothing to oppose Muhammad at all, but rather were guilty of the crime only of being non-Muslims?
And finally, and most importantly, does Tony Blair think, given that he has taken on the task of deciding the fate of Israel, essentially, by Making Peace or rather, through the time-honored (the U.N., William Rogers, Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton, tutti quanti)those Israelis to make further concessions in the hope, impossible and vain (just as Blair is impossibly vain), that this will somehow cause the Arab Muslims, the local ones called the "Palestinians," to change their beliefs, and for other Arabs and Muslims to accept, in perpetuity, the existence of an Infidel state, the state of Israel, in the midst of what the Arab Muslims see as forever Arab and Muslim land.
Would it be too much to ask the well-paid Mr. Blair (does he really have time to Make Peace In the Middle East, by the way, what with having to fly here, and make a speech there, pocketing the fat check in the enveloope, and of course to get cracking on that memoir for which he has just received a $9 million dollar advance), since he is determined to do what No Man Has Done Before, to read just one book, if that's all his busy busy schedule permits. That one book should be Majid Khadduri's Law of War and Peace in Islam. Let him study carefully the parts devoted to how Muslims regard treaties, agreements, hudnas, with all Infidels. What do they think? Are they just like us, in the West? Do they adhere to the principle of Pacta Sunt Servanda -- treaties are to be obeyed? See Grotius, Vitoria and Suarez, see Lauterpacht, see Stone, see see see. I'm sure he does. I'm sure he, Tony Blair, simply assumes that treaty-making is the same everywhere in the world. It has never occurred to him -- why should it, given his temperament, given his mental makeup -- that possibly in the world of Islam, treaty-making with Infidels is not a matter of Pacta Sunt Servanda, but of doing exactly as Muhammad did, in 628 A.D., when he made the Treaty, or Agreement, with the Meccans, a treaty that was essentially a "truce treaty" or "hudna" that was to last ten years, and that he broke at the first opportunity, just as soon as he felt strong enough to attack the Meccans. It is regarded in Muslim commentaries as the final word on how Muslims should regard any treaties, agreements, hudnas, that they might sign, at a time when such signing is made necessary by events.
Does Tony Blair know that? Does he care to examine all the other treaties and agreements that Israel entered into with the Arab Muslim states, starting with the Armistice Agreements of 1949? Does he?
Or is he too busy interviewing those researchers, and that ghost-writer, whom he will thank so generously for their unspecified "assistance," just as they all do, our Great Men of the age, with their fat unreadable memoirs, and their inner essential stupidity that never catches up with them, but that leaves all kinds of victims, sometimes millions of them, in their colossal wake.
Hugh, straight to the point yet again, Blair is a mass of contradictions in thought and deed and it is very evident in his mis-understanding of Islam.
First we have the bizarre, convoluted and contradictory thinking of Holland's Ella Vogelaar on display in the previous article. Next, the muddled, tortured logic of Tony Blair. One need not be opposed in principle to the creation of a Palestinians state to have read Blair's ramblings with utter bewilderment.
Is this what Europe has come to....sophisticated, cosmopolitan Europe, where politicians can no longer coherently articulate the policies they area advocating? Are we witnessing a culture-wide intellectual diminution? Or perhaps just the cognitive dissonance of being unable to say - for obvious political reasons - what one is actually advocating?
It's probably both.
What Blair needs is a rectal examination.
Just so he should know how it feels.
When the Brits hand over Northern Ireland then we can talk.
Thats what you get when you have people who believe in "REvelations" in politics they always have the "Guy from The Sky" trump card stuffed in the deck that makes them free to ignore facts.
I got an idea, let's give the Pali's statehood so we can prosecute them as a state, with B52"s. Well armed.
Blair needs a psychological shift or a lobotomy. The man is sounding like some demented crackhead in advocating that Israel basically commit suicide. The palestinians cannot be trusted (except to be violent) and thinking otherwise would be expecting Israel to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.
Blair should mind his own nation's business. The demise of a single kuffar nation, Israel, will do nothing to solve the Muslim Problem of the UK, of Europe, of the West, and of the Rest.
Concepts such as "forgive and forget" and "love thine enemy" are Christian ideas, which Muslims will only take advantage of. Don't expect the Palestinians to reciprocate in kind.
--
CT yank
I can recall three incidents which reminded me that the Left has a phobia of the
truth and try by all possible ways to avoid coming in contact with it.
1. Some six months ago I gave a university professor the film "ISLAM: What the West needs to know", and asked him to see at least part of it. He never did.
2. Four months ago I offered a colleague to read Trifkovic's “The Sword of the Prophet” after she admitted she knows nothing about Islam but, of course, disagreed with what I had to say . Last week I got the book back – unread.
3. A week ago I gave a teacher 2 pages of an article I had written . She still has not read it.
I can understand that sometimes it is difficult to read articles which go against what you believe in. But at least once it is necessary to read the documented proof when one exists of how the other side thinks . The Left refuses to do this . They have no clue what is going on. In fact the split between the mainstream media and the world of the internet bloggers has become wider than the gap between the official Soviet press and the Samizdat in the nineteen seventies. World leaders from Tony Blair to Olmert are making fools of themselves . History, if we manage somehow to survive , will not judge them lightly.
Needed a laugh this morning to accompany coffee and a juicy muffin...
What is this man on-Crack,Heroin,Speed or all three-with his expensive tastes must be Cocaine??
Bliar Blair-failed Actor & unscrupulous Architect
of turning Britain into a Banana Republic isn't one to 'rest on his laurels' -if a sniff of money is involved.
Fortunately there are too many intelligent Israelis, excluding Olmert, who will block any
such suicidal moves.
Well "Blair,my man" your 'friends' the Saudis will have to provide the money for your mortgages
[you helped stop charges of corruption against the
House of Saud-so guess they owe you] if powerful
Trendy Lefty ones such as the Clintons can't drum
up enough in their circle to hear you ramble on
at $200,000 a speech...
Why is it up to Israel to help create a "Palestinian" state? If the "Palestinian's" wanted a state, they would declare a state.
Do they really want a state? Why don't they have one? Everyone else tries to get them to have a state, but they always say no that is not just right we need this and that so no thanks (some translators of the Arabic render that as f*** you).
Aparently other Arab states do not want it to happen. Certainly not Egypt or Jordan. Saudi Arabia could sponsor a state but does not. They prefer to sponsor strife.
According to the "Palestinian's," the left, the UN, academics and varrious dhimmis, American's, the west and Israel are supposed to sponsor this state.
I as an American don't want that state; not even if someone else paid for it. I would expect it to be a terrorist state; a state of fear; a state sponsor of terror; a state of denial; a state of corruption. It would be just like it has always been but now dignified by a seat at the UN and before long the same gang of thugs and useful idiots would be demanding another state, maybe this one in the suburbs of London, Paris, Brussels, Rotterdam, Malmo or Detroit.
Is there ANYTHING, ANYTHING that can be done to stop this deliberate, sickening, calculated betrayal of Israel - and, indeed, of the Jews - to the Jihad?
I can't stand to watch. It's the political equivalent of one of those horrible beheading videos - with Blair and company helping to bind and hand over the victim.
No words. Eicha!!!
Hasn't he done enough damage already?
The support from the West for the Palestinians is based on fantasy rather than reality. Our leaders continue to play on their "grievances" as a way to remind the Western population that the most distressing problems in this world have been caused by us...and therefore through a new policy approach and newfound understanding, we can change them. It will be very controversial when a leader actually does identify the Palestinian problem as one of their own doing, because it removes the Western world from the role of understanding parent who can monitor and resolve disputes from above.
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