At 09:43 PM 3/23/02 -0600 Ronn Blankenship wrote:
>Can anyone explain to me why the Palestinians have responded to the current
>attempts to set up peace talks by stepping up the rate of suicide bombings
>to about one every day this past week? One would (perhaps naively?) think
>that if they want peace talks, they would take a break from terrorist
>attacks rather than increase them. The following article suggests that I'm
>not the only one who thinks that increased Palestinian violence means that
>the peace talks should be postponed.
Could it be because the international community insists upon negotiating
with terrorists? Indeed, the international community seems to
consistently respond to increased terrorism from the Palestinians with
euphemastic worries about "violence" and indeed calls for *even more*
negotiations with terrorists? In other words, could the Palestinians be
responding to the peace effort with more terrorism because they have been
conditioned to believe that terrorism is consistently rewarded by what they
want?
I'm starting to think that the fundamental political failure in the Middle
East is the moral equivalence
placed by the rest of the world between Israelis and Palestinians as if
they were just two squabbling
children. Sure both sides kill the other, but one side at least takes
reasonable steps to avoid killing
civillians (like evacuating buildings before it targets them), the other
blows up 12-year old girls' bat mitzvahs and sends young children of @10 to
throw grenades at Israeli Tanks. (The footage was shown on ABC News last
week - not that the Europeans will even issue a token statement about child
soldiers!) In such a topsy-turvy moral environment, I don't see how peace
is *possible* because the international community is continuing to reward,
indeed, incentivize evil actions.
And sure enough, this sort of policy produces events exactly like we
witnessed yesterday - Yasser Arafat
releases a man from prison who had been jailed for plotting a terrorist
attack on Israel, the man promptly goes and blows up an Israeli bus, and
the international community praises Arafat for actually condmening the attack!
Go figure.
JDG
__________________________________________________________
John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - ICQ #3527685
"We fight against poverty because faith requires it and
conscience demands it." - George W. Bush 3/22/02
