George's behavior can bring lacerates to your eyes
By SARAH HONIG
When young George Dubbleya was shipped off to prep school, his concerned mother equipped him with a thick Roget's Thesaurus in the hope that it would enrich his vocabulary. According to his own later account, she explained that the volume might help him avoid repeating words.
On his first freshman assignment, G.W. needed a synonym for tears (the kind that well up in eyes). He looked up the entry "tear" in mom's Thesaurus and ended up describing "lacerates" rolling down one's cheeks.
We could give G.W. the benefit of our doubt and assume that, being linguistically challenged, he looked up the word "terrorist" (which he only reserves for select fanatic cutthroats who attack Americans and Europeans but not Israelis). He may thus have stumbled upon "armed gangs" and resorted to that misnomer to garnish his rhetoric with a tad verbal diversity.
Consequently, when he was playing host to Palestinian Authority head-honcho Mahmoud Abbas, a terrorist in his own right, G.W. urged Abbas to constrain "armed gangs," and paid obligatory lip service to the need to curb "violence." He didn't call a spade a spade, a terrorist a terrorist, or even mention Hamas by name.
Were he more adept with a Thesaurus, we may have taken offence. In his case, however, there may be extenuating circumstances. If lacerates are tears, why not substitute "armed gangs" for terrorists?
Maybe because an aggressive pan-Arabist/Islamo-fascist infrastructure - which for the past 130 years has been waging at the very least an ethnic-cleansing campaign against this country's Jews (though deep down aspiring to outright genocide) - isn't a petty renegade bunch. Via decades of intense brainwashing and ruthless intimidation, it has amassed the support of the population it controls. The society in which these supposed outlaw bands operate doesn't reject them. It adulates and abets its proclaimed heroes.
There's no "cycle of violence" here, wherein one gang attacks its rival, provokes retaliation and then strikes again. This is a concerted onslaught of historical magnitude that wasn't triggered by what deliberate distorters or the intellectually indolent term "occupation."
THERE WOULDN'T have been any occupation, were it not for the war against the Jewish state to begin with. That war started before the Jewish state was a feasible undertaking. It drew blood in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-39 and throughout the 1940s. It doomed to unspeakable deaths in the Holocaust innumerable Jews denied refuge here by Arab Nazi-collaborators.
Their collaboration reached peak proportions when Abbas's predecessor Haj Amin el-Husseini spent WWII in Berlin as Hitler's guest, recruited Muslims to the Axis forces, foiled the rescue of Jewish children and of Hungarian Jewry, visited Auschwitz and planned its replica near Nablus. (In his PhD "dissertation" Abbas denied the Holocaust ever occurred.)
When alluding to nothing more troublesome than "armed gangs" and the duty to deal with quasi-criminal "violence" - and when feting and extolling Abbas who colludes with the aforementioned "gangs" - G.W. let Abbas turn him into West Side Story's pathetic Officer Krupke. Abbas sold G.W. "a touchin' good story," blamed everyone else for his shortcomings, and argued that he and his "gangsters" are "depraved on account we're deprived." G.W. was opportunely all too eager to swallow Abbas's line that:
We ain't no delinquents,
We're misunderstood,
Deep down inside us there is good!
That "untapped good" G.W. dubbed "Palestinian democracy," and opined that "violence" is bad for said democracy. He never specified that "violence" slaughters Jews - like the youngsters waiting for a ride in Gush Etzion and passersby buying felafel in Hadera.
And so Abbas, straight-faced, continued to complain:
My parents treat me rough,
With all the marijuana,
They won't give me a puff.
They didn't wanna have me,
But somehow I was had.
Leapin' lizards, that's why I'm so bad!
Officer G.W., to judge from his pronouncements, concurred that Palestinians are "sociologically sick," in sore need of pampering, coddling, boosting and bolstering. G.W. therefore remonstrates with Israel for defending itself and demands it lift roadblocks and facilitate traffic between Gaza and Judea - through Israel proper. He feigns ignorance of the fact that this would afford easier access for mass-murderers into Israeli population centers.
All G.W. wants is to pacify the international community's screeching chorus of proverbial judges, shrinks and social workers. He could expiate some guilt at Israel's expense and appease Arab wrath with an Israeli coin.
It pays G.W. not to notice that Abbas and the "armed gangs" don't differ in strategic objectives, but only in the tactics they adopt to achieve these objectives. Abbas isn't moderate, only pragmatic. He'll accept (for now) a return to pre-1967 demarcations and Israel's inundation with Palestinian "refugees." Others around him are willing to compromise (for now) on reducing Israel to the untenable 1947 partition lines vehemently rejected by yesteryear's Arabs. The unnamed armed gangs want the whole shebang - all of "occupied Palestine" - which they define as everything between the Jordan and the sea. That would mean no Israel whatever.
Abbas hankers after the same but prudently, in stages. The gangs he won't dismantle are more impetuous and less deceptive.
The questions now are whether Abbas made a sucker out of G.W., whether G.W just couldn't home in on Thesaurus subtleties, or whether G.W. is cynically duplicitous. Any of the above could cause lots more lacerates to be shed.
Before Abbas crowingly yells "Krup You," we'd like to suggest that:
It ain't just a question of misunderstood;
Deep down inside him, he's no good!