Tel-Chai Nation

US president George W. Bush ruins his credibility by saying that Israel should withdraw from Gaza while at the same time saying that it would be cowardly of the US troops to withdraw from Iraq. First, he says:

US President George W. Bush reiterated his support for next week's pullout from the Gaza Strip, saying the evacuation of troops and settlers would be good for Israel.
"I believe that the decision that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has made and is going to follow through is one that is going to be good for Israel," he said in an interview with Israel's Channel One network from his Texas ranch.

(snip)

Bush said that the pullout would help the emergence of democracy among the Palestinian people which would ultimately reap peace dividends for Israel.

"I think this will create an opportunity for democracy to emerge and democracies are peaceful," the US president said.

Then, he says:

President Bush said Thursday he understands and respects the views of anti-war advocates like a California mother camped outside his Texas ranch to mourn her soldier son fallen in Iraq, but said it would be a mistake to bring U.S. troops home now.
"I understand the anguish that some feel about the death that takes place," Bush said.

"I also have heard the voices of those saying: 'Pull out now!' " he said. "And I've thought about their cry and their sincere desire to reduce the loss of life by pulling our troops out. I just strongly disagree."

Immediate withdrawal "would send a terrible signal to the enemy," the president said.

This shows that truly, even on Iraq, he is not genuine in his positions, and in fact, what has he done to ensure that the Kurds are given compensation, or that Iraq's "constitution" doesn't include anti-semitic "laws" that prohibit Jews from living in Iraq. The US citizenry would be strongly advised to think twice about being fooled by this president even on the war in Iraq.

(Via Lawrence Simon.)

Update: here's an earlier item from April, from the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick talks about how the US president continues to maintain a double-standard in regards to the PLO, by continuing his refusal to acknowledge their being an anti-democratic entity:

At the Bush-Sharon press briefing on Monday, we saw which way the wind will be blowing in the coming months and years. For his part, Bush refused to countenance the notion that the PA's current lack of action against terrorism (that is, active protection and support of terrorists) might hold up further Israeli concessions. He explained that his native optimism makes it impossible for him to believe that things will be bad and so he can't foresee a situation in which events warrant putting off further Israeli land giveaways to the PA.

The only clear position Bush adopted during his appearance with Sharon was that he sees the expulsion of Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria as a mere first step. If this hadn't been the case, he would not have said – three times – that Israel mustn't build in the rest of its communities in Judea and Samaria, even those that Sharon insists Bush has slated for inclusion in the envisioned shrunken, post-roadmap Israel.

While as for Ariel Sharon:

Sharon, with no way to hide the fact that for the past year he has been lying to the Israeli public by claiming that in exchange for the destruction of the Jewish presence in Gaza and northern Samaria he received American support for expanding the Jewish communities in the rest of Judea and Samaria, has simply changed the subject. He has changed the subject by changing the enemy. It is not the Palestinians who worry him anymore, but the Jews. It's the Jews – and in particular his political supporters turned opponents who two years ago elected him on the basis of his declared opposition to precisely the unilateral giveaway plan he is now forcing them to swallow – who are the greatest danger.

In an exclusive interview with NBC TV, which set the tone for his entire visit, Sharon said that Israel "looks like on the eve of a civil war." He then went on to say, "All my life I was defending [the] life of Jews. Now, for [the] first time, security steps are taken to protect me from Jews."

The sheer obscenity of this statement by Sharon, made at the same time that the people he is set to expel from their homes were being attacked by Palestinian mortars that Sharon ordered the IDF to do nothing about, is made all the more clear when one looks at a statement he himself made 10 years ago. Speaking to Kfar Chabad's local newspaper in 1995 of the press accusations at the time that opponents of the so-called peace process were inciting civil war, Sharon said, "Look what happened in Stalinist Russia, for example. In the mid-1930s, the Soviet authorities disseminated stories that there was a plan to assassinate Stalin. They were used as a justification for destroying the high command of the Red Army as well as the Jewish writers and the Jewish doctors. This is exactly what the Rabin government is doing now in Israel Have we gotten to such Stalinist Bolshevism? Where are they leading with the blood libels they are putting out? To the abandonment of the settlers in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and maybe to a civil war. We have to shout out the warning: Tyrants at the gate."

So there we have it: Not only has US policy of safeguarding the PA while insisting on further Israeli land concessions to the PA made terrorism the choice of the Palestinian electorate, but Ariel Sharon's decision to go along with the US has made him chart a policy course that leads, as he stated so well a decade ago, to grave dangers to Israeli democracy.

When reading this, it's apparent that the middle east is far from democratizing, as Natan Sharansky has also indicated, at least not at our end of the spectrum.

On National Review, we find that, while there was a trial held recently last July, in which seven men were charged with fund-raising for the Hamas, Scott McClellan, spokesman for the Bush administration, would not admit to their being a terrorist gang. When interviewed last Wednesday and asked about what would happen if they came to dominate what passes for "legislature" in the PLO, this is what he said in response to the following question by a press interviewer:

Question: In the event that Hamas, a terrorist organization not yet disarmed by the PA, wins a majority in the legislative PA, will the Bush administration still send $350 million U.S. taxpayer dollars to the PA, or not?

McCLELLAN: It's — the one thing that you see when people have elections that are free and fair is that they tend to choose people who are committed to improving their livelihood, not people who are committed to terrorist acts. And I think if you look back at the previous Palestinian elections, the people that were elected, while they might have been members of Hamas, they were business professionals. They were people that ran on talking about improving the quality of life for the Palestinian people and addressing their economic needs and addressing other needs that are important to them — not terrorists. [Emphasis added.]

What a shame that McClellan clearly misses the point and reality of the situation. For as McCarthy points out:

What is McClellan thinking about here? All terrorist organizations engage in this kind of beguiling propaganda. That Nazis had lots of spiffy spokesmen talking about improving people’s lives. So does the IRA. So does Hezbollah. Osama bin Laden’s construction concerns built roads and infrastructure to improve people’s lives in Sudan and Afghanistan — all the better for ingress and egress to the many terror training camps he ran in those countries with impunity.

Needless to say, if the government were to give any aid to even an entity like the Hamas, that would be spending money in the name of the US population, which deserves much better. As McCarthy adds:

The rationale for the Bush presidency, the bedrock basis for reelection, is that the President has been clear-eyed and unflinching on the central issue of the day: the threat posed by militant Islamic terrorism. Again and again, he has said it: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. This was the firm foundation of the Bush Doctrine — no quarter for terrorists, no place, no how. And no exceptions for the Palestinian Authority.

We have structured our law around it. Numerous people have been prosecuted under beefed up laws that forbid providing any kind of material support to terrorist organizations. In case after case, those defendants plead the same thing — what we might now call the “McClellan Defense”: “Sure the government might say they’re a terrorist organization, and sure they might mass-murder civilians, but they do a lot of good, too. They run charities. They run social service organizations. They have a lot of good business people who talk about improving the quality of life. I was only contributing to this happy-face side of the house, not the bad terrorists.”

The defense gets laughed out of court, because most people are not fools. As a practical matter, people know dollars are fungible. If you give money to a terrorist organization — like the $350 million McClellan indicates we are thinking about giving to a Hamas-dominated PA — you don’t control it; the terrorists do, and they decide whether to channel it to healthcare or bomb-building.

Which is tragically what the PLO has been doing now for the past decade: using it to fund not only terrorist attacks against Israelis, but also their own inner circle, instead of the common civilians and the infrastructure of Arab neighborhoods. Nor have they in any ways tried to build a stable economy or jobs for local residents living in areas under their control, one of the reasons why many Arabs have had to turn to Israeli workplaces in search of a job.

The above also points out how the PLO is, simply put, suppressing its own people.

Labels: dhimmitude, Israel, jihad, terrorism, United States, White House