A walk in Ramadi

Join Michael J Totten as he walks the streets of Ramadi, Iraq.

In the doghouse

Post deleted.

The suicide of a nation

I’ve spent a lot of the weekend hunting around the blogosphere looking for posts on the current situation in the Gaza Strip. I’ve seen death porn videos, rampaging looters, murders, shootings. The little Palestinian statelet has imploded, and no-one seems to know what to do or what will happen next.

It’s easy to reach judgements from afar, and even easier to make a fool of yourself prognosticating about a region you’ve never visited. But it seems to me that the nation-that-would-be-Palestine has effectively committed suicide.

Economically, Palestine is already non-viable. In March, the newly-appointed Finance Minister of the Hamas/Fatah government, Salam Fayyad (recently appointed PM by President Mahmoud Abbas, following the catastrophe in Gaza), told Newsweek:

How long can you survive if the sanctions continue?
On our own, we bring in $15 to 20 million per month—compared to a need of $160 million per month. Survival depends on how successful we are in bridging the gap. Clearly, you can’t go long with 10 percent of what you need. That’s all we have control over—just 10 percent of our need. I’m a realist, and one cannot look at that as a sustainable situation.

The territories can generate just 10% of of the revenue they need to sustain themselves. All the rest is provided by donors: the US, the EU and the Arab states.

This exposes the long-masked reality of the Oslo Accords: they were just a huge bribe, intended to get Arafat to say, at least in English, that the PA recognised the existence of Israel. (In Arabic, Arafat said things very different.) But it also established the territories as eternal dependants, reliant on outside aid for salaries, infrastructure, education and health. There is very little of a self-sustaining indigenous economy to provide jobs, livelihoods and sustenance for the millions in the territories. On these figures, they will be perpetual beggars at the tables of the world. Such will be the true legacy of Oslo.

But bad as the situation of the Palestinians is in economic terms, in moral terms it is far, far worse.

For a generation, and certainly since the first intifada, Palestinians have been weaned on a diet of hatred, violence, suicide-aspiration and genocide. A poignant witness to this is Daryl Jones, an Australian aid worker who went to Jenin in the hope and expectation of assisting the Palestinians in their struggle, only to find, when she opened her eyes, that they systematically brainwashed their children into becoming agents of indiscriminate death.

Her tears in this video speak volumes, as she recounts how dreadfully she allowed herself to be deceived.

It is impossible to build a state on this basis. If you indoctrinate a generation, starting at kindergarten, to aspire to murder, to feed them from the fountains of race hatred, and then, when they’re old enough to be of some use, you put guns in their hands and bombs in their pockets, you get — well, you get what happened in Gaza these past few days.

The brutality has been beyond belief. As liberal Israeli blogger Yaeli said, reluctantly posting one of the vilest of the death porn videos:

….if I hear one more word about Israeli brutality. Our soldiers have never, ever, ever done anything even remotely in the ballpark of something like this. Not in Gaza, not in the West Bank, not in Lebanon, nowhere. We do not kidnap people from their homes and then throw them alive off rooftops. We do not intentionally try to kill little children. We do not kick people to death in the streets and we do not kick them to death in private. We play in a whole different playground folks. And we sure as hell don’t treat our fellow citizens in this way. For those who want to claim that Israel is the most horrible, violent and oppressive regime in the history of the planet, this video invites you to get some perspective.

I know the Israelis are no angels, and have been guilty of acts of aggression and stupidity. But they never did anything like this.

These bloody hands had just dismembered two
IDF reservists (Ramallah, 2000).

Nor do they teach their children like this.

:
To valorise and emulate that deed.

If you grow children to be murderers, then that’s what they will be.

It may be wrong, or fanciful, to say this: but I think the Palestinians have just dealt themselves the greatest moral defeat they ever could have suffered — one more far-reaching, I suspect, than the military humiliation of the Six Day War. They have proved to the world and to themselves that they cannot do what the Israelis have done: they can’t create their own nation. Even with the Arab states behind them (sort of), most of the rest of the world on their side, the UN as their echo chamber, and an endless purse of money to spend which they never even had to earn, they still can’t do it.

The Palestinians cannot build a civil society while their collective moral compass pulls them inexorably toward hatred and violence. Whether there’s much prospect of that changing is hard to say, but all the portents look bad. Palestine as so far constructed is a criminal swamp and a rage for destruction — a rage whose weapon is their own children, whose minds have been warped into homicidal and genocidal delusion, and whose deaths in the service of death serve as a general template for the Palestinians’ own national suicide.

__________________________

Update: It may be my weakness for metaphysics, but this analysis by Fouad Ajami struck me as absolutely true right down to the bone.

(Hat tip: Meryl Yourish.)

Oh, and some heart-breaking irony.

Ms. Vakaivosavosa returns

Excellent Fijian blogger

Ms. Vakaivosavosa,

who went off the air a few weeks ago due to the kind of pressures bloggers find themselves under in various parts of the world, is back - and on WordPress.

Go visit.

A great voice from the South Pacific.

Sudanese blogger

I liked this image and message in the sidebar of the Sudanese blog If God Brings You To It, He Will Bring You Through It. I really liked the blog, as well.

I know it seems trite to say it, given the situation — but you go, Kizzie. Keep safe, and God bless.

New header

I’ve changed the header image because the Slovenian streetscape reflected in the waters of the canal below was making me dizzy. So no more hanging upside down in Ljubljana.

The new header is a picture I took in the Museum of the 1944 Uprising in Warsaw.

The dead looking out at the living. Or possibly the other way around.

The Sandmonkey exits

One of the best bloggers anywhere is hanging up his boots.

Farewell, Sandmonkey, and keep safe.

Such is the fate of a free spirit in Egypt in these turbulent times.

One of the chief reasons is the fact that there has been too much heat around me lately. I no longer believe that my anonymity is kept, especially with State Secuirty agents lurking around my street and asking questions about me since that day. I ignore that, the same way I ignored all the clicking noises that my phones started to exhibit all of a sudden, or the law suit filed by Judge Mourad on my friends, and instead grew bolder and more reckless at a time where everybody else started being more cautious. It took me a while to take note of the fear that has been gripping our little blogsphere and comprehend what it really means. The prospects for improvment, to put it slightly, look pretty grim. I was the model of caution, and believing in my invincipility by managing not to get arrested for the past 2 and a half years, I’ve grown reckless. Stupid Monkey. Stupid!

Another excellent Egyptian blogger, The Big Pharaoh, has been seen less and less in recent weeks.

These are important, independent voices from the Middle East and they will be sorely and sadly missed.

Both The Sandmonkey and The Big Pharaoh were contributors to the wonderful Good Neighbours blog, a site dedicated to fostering dialogue and understanding across national boundaries in the Middle East.

Update: Pamela at Atlas Shrugs has an interview with The Sandmonkey here.

Defeatism in Washington

Omar at Iraq The Model comments on “the war is lost” rhetoric recently emanating from the Democrat leadership on Capitol Hill:

General Petraeus said yesterday that things will get tougher before they get easier in Iraq. This is the sort of of fact-based, realistic assessment of the situation which politicians should listen to when they discuss the war thousands of miles away.

We must give this effort the chance it deserves. We should provide all the support necessary. We should heed constructive critique, not the empty rhetoric that the ‘war is lost.’

It is not lost. Quitting is not an option we can afford—not in America and definitely not in Iraq.

Read the whole thing.

Further: Democrat defeatism is playing well in the Middle East, as well it might. More here.

The Mystery of the Disappearing Comments

This was a pointless post so I deleted it. I was just playing around with some screen capture software. After Midnight, too, which is always a dangerous time for me.

The other side of British soldiers

From the great photo-journalist Michael Yon, embedded with British troops in Basra.

As the firing began to wane, the day’s heat began to fade along with it. Dust wafted thick on the cooling air. The soldiers were still sweating when a light rain began to fall. Iraqi dust polluted the pure rain as it fell, forming mud drops that splattered onto man and machine.

In an operation that lasted over four hours, British forces killed 26-27 enemy and sustained no casualties. 5 Platoon fired more than 4,000 bullets before their guns began to cool, and about 15 of the enemy kills were accredited to 5 Platoon. Another platoon captured two enemy fighters, including one Iraqi policeman who might have been heeding al Sadr’s call for Iraqi Police and Army forces to turn on their Coalition partners.

Richard at EU Referendum posts this wry comment in pictures:

I don’t think the guys Yon travelled with cry themselves to sleep thinking of their mothers. And if they do, they keep quiet about it.

There are great stories here; but the MSM won’t tell them. It’s left to a maverick like Yon.

And to the other one, Michael J. Totten, who recently won The Week magazine’s Blogger of the Year award, but said that Yon would have had his vote.

Both are brilliant, indispensable voices in a world disfigured by MSM carelessness, ignorance and spin.