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Jewish World Review August 14, 2009 / 24 Menachem- Av 5769 Gazan and West Bank ‘leaders’ come clean, but Obama is still playing deaf By Caroline B. Glick
At the conference, Fatah's supposedly feuding old guard and young guard were
united in their refusal to reach an accommodation with Israel. Both old and
young endorsed the use of terrorism against Israel. Both embraced the Aksa
Martyrs Brigade terror group as a full-fledged Fatah organization.
Both demanded that all Jews be expelled from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem
ahead of the establishment of a Jew-free Palestinian state.
Both claimed that any settlement with Israel be preceded by an Israeli
withdrawal to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines and by Israel's
destruction as a Jewish state through its acceptance of millions of
foreign-born hostile Arabs as immigrants within its truncated borders.
Both demanded that all terrorists be released from Israeli prisons as a
precondition for "peace" talks with Israel.
Both accused Israel of murdering Yassir Arafat.
Both approved building a strategic alliance with Iran.
In staking out these extremist positions, both Fatah's old guard and its
younger generation of leaders demonstrated that Fatah's goal today is the
same as it has been since the its founding in 1959: Liberating Palestine
(from the river to the sea) by wiping Israel off the map.
Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas's decision to remove both his own mask and that
of his organization should cause the Netanyahu government to reassess its
current policies towards the group. For the past four months, Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu and his government have quietly barred all Jewish
construction in eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem neighborhoods as
well as in Judea and Samaria. The government's unofficial policy has been
implemented in the hopes of pleasing the Obama administration which argues
that by barring Jewish building, Israel will encourage the Fatah-controlled
Palestinian Authority to moderate its policies and so engender an atmosphere
conducive to a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian conflict with Israel.
The Fatah conference put paid that fiction.
Fatah's message to the Netanyahu government is important. But even more
important is the message it conveys to the Obama administration. For
Netanyahu, the Fatah gathering bore out his prior assessment that the group
is a wolf in sheep's clothing. For US President Barack Obama, the message of
the Fatah conclave was that his administration's assumptions not only about
Fatah, but about terrorists and terror-supporting regimes in general are
completely wrong.
For the Obama administration Fatah was supposed to be the poster child for
moderate terrorists. Fatah was supposed to be the prototype of the noble
terrorist organization that really just wants respect. It was supposed to be
the group that proved the central contention of the Obama White House's
strategy for dealing with terror, namely, that all terrorists want is to be
appeased.
But over the past week in Bethlehem Fatah's leaders said they will not be
appeased. To the international community whose billions of dollars in aid
money and boundless good will and political support they have pocketed over
the past decade and a half they sent a clear message. They remain an
implacable terror group devoted to the physical annihilation of Israel.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration is already making clear that it is
incapable of accepting this basic truth. As Abbas and his cronies were
exposing their true nature in Bethlehem, Obama's counterterrorism advisor
John Brennan was giving a speech in Washington where he demonstrated the
administration's ideological inflexibility.
Speaking before the Center for Strategic and International Studies last
Thursday, Brennan declared that appeasing terrorists and terror supporting
regimes and societies by bowing to their political demands is the central
plank of the administration's counterterror strategy. As he put it, "Even as
we condemn and oppose the illegitimate tactics used by terrorists, we need
to acknowledge and address the legitimate needs and grievances of ordinary
people those terrorists claim to represent."
To this end, Brennan stressed that for the Obama administration, the
now-discredited Fatah model of conferring political legitimacy and funding
on terrorists in a bid to transform them into good citizens must be
implemented for every terror group in the world except al Qaida. In
furtherance of this goal, the US government will no longer refer to
America's fight against terror a "war on terror" and it will no longer refer
to the enemy it fights as "jihadists" or the cause for which these "violent
extremists" fight a "jihad."
As Brennan explained it, referring to terrorists as terrorists is
unacceptable because doing so sets the US against terror supporting regimes
that the Obama administration believes are all amenable to appeasement. And
referring to Islamic terrorists as jihadists gives the jihadists the "right"
to define what jihad is. Since the Obama administration perceives itself as
a greater authority on Islamic law and tradition than the likes of Osama bin
Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, Ayatollah Khomeini, Khaled Mashal and their fellow
jihadists worldwide, Brennan unhesitatingly asserted that "'Jihad'… means to
purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal."
Building on the false Fatah model of appeasable terrorists, Brennan
indicated that the Obama administration believes that Hizbullah is well on
its way to becoming a respectable political actor. As he sees it, simply by
participating in Lebanon's political process, the Iranian proxy has earned
the right to be viewed as a legitimate political force. Brennan cited the
fact that in addition to active terrorist elements, Hizbullah members today
include "members of parliament, in the cabinet; [and] there are lawyers,
doctors, others who are part of the Hizbullah organization" as a reason to
celebrate the group. He further claimed that Hizbullah members who are not
actively involved in terrorism "are in fact renouncing that type of
terrorism and violence and are trying to participate in the political
process in a very legitimate fashion."
As the Jerusalem Post's Barry Rubin argued, Brennan's assessment of Hizbullah is not merely factually wrong. It
also exposes a deep misunderstanding of why Hizbullah entered the Lebanese
political fray — and why Hamas entered the Palestinian political fray — in
the first place. Brennan's analysis is factually wrong because at no point
has any Hizbullah member ever condemned or in any way criticized its
paramilitary or terror cadres. To the contrary, Hizbullah's non-military
personnel have gone on record repeatedly praising their terror brethren and
have expressed disappointment that they are not among the movement's
fighters.
Like Hamas — which Brennan in the past has expressed support for
recognizing — Hizbullah entered Lebanese politics with the intention of
taking over the country. It wishes to control Lebanon both to protect its
military forces, and to advance its jihadist aim of spreading the Iranian
revolution and destroying Israel. Like Hamas, Hizbullah's political
empowerment has not moderated it. It has strengthened its military arm and
made it politically impossible for its domestic rivals to oppose its war
against Israel, its ties to Iran and Syria and its independent military
force.
Unfortunately, as Brennan made clear last Thursday, the Obama administration
is intellectually wed to the notion that terrorists like Hassan Nasrallah,
and terror supporting regimes like Bashar Assad's Syria and his overlords in
Iran just want to be accepted by the West. They cannot accept any evidence
to the contrary.
This week the Obama administration dispatched senior military officials to
Damascus for yet another round of friendly talks with the Iranian satellite.
According to media citations of Pentagon and State Department officials, the
administration is looking to cut a deal where in exchange for Syrian
agreement to curtail its support for jihadists in Iraq, the US will put
pressure on Israel to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria.
As for Iran, the administration has officially given the mullahs until next
month to decide whether they are interested in negotiating a deal with the
US regarding their nuclear program. Although Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton and her colleagues in the administration are beginning to
acknowledge that Iran will not meet their deadline, the administration has
no Plan B.
The White House continues to oppose placing additional sanctions on Iran.
State Department officials said this week that they fear that additional
sanctions — including widely supported Congressional bills that would limit
refined petroleum imports to Iran — would cause the Iranian public to rally
around the regime. The fact that the Iranian public is in large part now
begging Western countries to reject the legitimacy of the regime has made no
impact on the Obama administration. Indeed, top US officials are unanimous
in their willingness to accept Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the legitimate
president of Iran. Appeasement remains the only option the administration is
willing to consider.
The Obama administration's unswerving efforts to accommodate terrorists and
terror supporting regimes wherever they are to be found demonstrates that
for the administration, appeasement is not a tactic for achieving US policy
aims. Appeasing terrorists and regimes that support them is the aim of US
policy.
All of this makes clear that in spite of its reasonable desire to reach a
deal with the Obama White House, the Netanyahu government must abandon any
plans to do so. The Jerusalem Post reported this week that the government
is now negotiating a six-month extension of its unofficial ban on Jewish
construction in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria with US officials. These
negotiations must be ended immediately. Indeed, the proper response to
the Fatah
conference is for the government to announce that it is approving all
building requests it has held up for the past four months. It should also
declare that from now on it will treat all requests for building permits in
Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem in the same manner that it treats such
requests from everywhere else in the country.
The Obama administration's devotion to appeasement shows that even if it
wished to reward Israel in some way for going along with a construction
freeze, it has nothing to offer. The only play in its game book is further
concessions to terrorists and regimes that sponsor them. A settlement freeze
will lead to a demand to accept a Lebanese "unity" government where
Hizbullah reigns supreme, or a Palestinian "unity" government that paves the
way for Hamas's international legitimization. An Israeli willingness to
discriminate against Jews in Jerusalem will lead to a further demand that
Israel cede the Golan Heights to Damascus, and accept Iran as a nuclear
power.
For the Obama administration there is but one way of looking at terrorists:
Just as Fatah can be appeased, so the mullahs can be accommodated.
Fatah's message that it will not be appeased is a message the Obama
administration will never receive.
Interested in a private Judaic studies instructor — for free? Let us know by clicking here.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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