{Cross-posted at News and Views from Jews Down Under and the Times of Israel.}
The tidbit below was written by Reuters and published by Y-Net:
It is hard to imagine that Obama does have a learning disability given the fact that he was the president of the Harvard Law Review - a little organization, by the way, that my eldest brother was also at one time a member of. Furthermore, he is among the most successful politicians in the long, miserable history of politicians. So, really, how stupid can the man possibly be?Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Wednesday his peace negotiators had resigned over the lack of progress in US-brokered statehood talks clouded by Israeli settlement building.
The development would mark a new low point for the talks with Israel that resumed in July and which officials from both sides have said have made little headway...
In a statement to Reuters TV on Wednesday, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat did not elaborate on the report of his resignation, but said the sessions with Israel were frozen.
"In reality, the negotiations stopped last week in light of the settlement announcements last week," he said.
And, yet, the Obama administration is making the same fundamental mistake today that it made directly out of the gate during his first term. When it comes to the Arab-Israel non-peace process the very first mistake that Obama made, as I have discussed ad nauseum since 2009, is on the insistence of "total settlement freeze."
There is absolutely no reason in this world why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and miserable little dictator Mahmoud Abbas, cannot sit in a room and draw a line on a map, even if some Jews are building housing for themselves on the other side of that line. To think otherwise is racist on its face and it is long past time that the Netanyahu government said so.
The question now becomes, has Barack Obama learned nothing from the past? Is he capable of learning from experience and changing direction when necessary? It certainly doesn't seem so. Just as the demand for "total settlement freeze" wrecked the first Obama attempt at negotiations, under Secretary Hillary Clinton, so it is now wrecking his second attempt at negotiations, under Secretary John Kerry.
Kerry calls the settlements "illegitimate," but what does that mean, exactly? Other than the fact that both Abbas and Obama want to tell Jewish people where we should be allowed to live and, thus, build housing for ourselves, it doesn't mean much. Notice that he doesn't use the word "illegal." There is a reason for that and the reason is that any such contention has been refuted over and over and over again. Furthermore, any such contention would need to be grounded within UN deliberations and decisions, but the UN is notoriously corrupt and is primarily a vehicle that the Arab and Muslim governments use to lambaste Israel out of a toxic, pervasive, and fourteen hundred year old Arab-Muslim religious hatred for the Jewish people.
In this way the United Nations, which makes international law, has entirely undermined the very notion of "international law." Since international law is determined by the UN and since the UN is under the domination of corrupt Arab and Muslim dictatorships, why should anyone take international law seriously? It is rarely enforced and it is always politicized and, therefore, it is international law, itself, which has become entirely illegitimate.
Housing cannot be illegitimate. Housing is either well-built upon a solid foundation or it is not. One thing is certain, the non-peace process is most obviously not built upon a solid foundation and the reason for that is because what the Arabs want is not peace, but eventual victory over their former Jewish subjects.
From the comments:
1. Peace talks, shmeace talks
Good riddance. Who wants to negotiate with terrorist scum anyway?
Righteous Zionist, Israel (11.13.13)My, my. Somebody certainly got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. "Terrorist scum"? That is rather strong language in reference to Mahmoud Abbas and his team, don't you think?
No?
8. Stalled talks = Israel not handing out more free prizes
Palestinians just got prisoners released and an extra 75 million from Kerry but that was yesterday. If they are going to talk they want more free prizes. The US, EU and Israel are dumb enough to do it.
Sam, Canada (11.13.13)Sam in Canada is correct.
The US, the EU, and Israel are, in fact, dumb enough to do it. My evidence for this assertion is the simple fact that we keep seeing them do it! Israel just forked over a bunch of murderers - including a murderer of a Holocaust survivor - who were hailed as heroes by the Palestinian Authority and the US just handed out 75 million tax-payer dollars so that Saeb Erekat could sit in a room and look at some Jews.
I wonder if he brought his knitting needles.