BUSH LOSES HIS MORAL COMPASS

Mr President, what has happened to you? (Melanie Phillips - Spectator UK)
You are the President of the United States. You are committed to a doctrine, shaped by 9/11, which says that never again will terror or illegitimate force be appeased. So what happens when you arrive at a formula to end the Middle East conflict called a ‘Road Map’ whose first requirement, that the Palestinians must dismantle their infrastructure of terror, is ignored by the Palestinians who continue to carry out rocket barrages and terrorist attacks and who make no attempt whatever to dismantle the said terror infrastructure? Why, you convene another conference where you announce a glorious new prospect for peace in which the parties solemnly pledge to respect their obligations under the Road Map! Oh, and also to

immediately launch good-faith bilateral negotiations in order to conclude a peace treaty, resolving all outstanding issues, including all core issues, without exception

So even though step one on the Road Map has been and is still being comprehensively ignored, that can be shelved under ‘meaningless platitudes’ along with the evidence of the continuing attacks; and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah which is continuing to mount such attacks — indeed, has mounted even more of them than Hamas — will be engaged in ‘good faith’ negotiations with its victims about how many of its demands its victims will now be expected graciously to accommodate. You then congratulate both sides for their

strong leadership

and go on to say things which are either ridiculous or obnoxious. For example, that you are

determined to confront terrorism and incitement, whether committed by Palestinians or Israelis

So you think that annihilatory terror is the equivalent to the attempt by its victims to defend themselves against it, do you? You have simply lost your moral compass, along with your grip on reality. No wonder you are now happy to throw Israel to the wolves; no wonder you go on in that speech to get everything else so terribly wrong. You say:

President Abbas understands that a Palestinian state will not be born of terror, and that terrorism is the enemy standing in the way of a state.

Well actually it’s not just the terrorism which is sponsored in part by the Fatah offshoot the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, but the strategic aim of that terror which is openly espoused by Abbas’s Fatah, namely the destruction of Israel as demonstrated by the demand for mass Arab immigration into Israel, and the bald statement by chief negotiator Saeb Erekat earlier this month that the Palestinians would not recognise Israel as a Jewish state. Nevertheless, you go on to laud Abbas a ‘responsible leader’ because

He and Prime Minister Fayyad have both declared, without hesitation, that they are opposed to terrorism and committed to peace. They're committed to turning these declarations into actions on the ground to combat terror.

They don’t say? A few days before Annapolis, Israeli Ido Zoldan was gunned down and murdered by Fatah terrorists. Fatah, not Hamas. Moreover, the reason they were able to murder him was almost certainly because, at America’s insistence, Israel had dismantled 24 security roadblocks — as one of those gestures of compromise and goodwill you insist must be made . But it’s ok, because you tell us that President Abbas and his government are

Standing against this dark vision.

Actually, through this lamentable episode it is you who have darkened an already bleak landscape. True, at least you didn’t throw Syria any further bones and instead wagged a finger at it over its interference in Lebanon. And all Condi's lethally fatuous 'final status' blatherings have bitten the dust. But the fact that you put that kind of pressure on Israel to commit national suicide remains a permanent stain on your record. Moreover, by resting the whole charade upon what is essentially untrue — treating Fatah as responsible interlocutors for peace, characterising ‘others’ as extremists and refusing to hold the belligerents of more than six decades to account for their refusal to this day to stop trying to eradicate the Jewish homeland — what you have re-started is not a peace process but a route to further bloodshed, misery and deep injustice.

We’ve all been here before. Annapolis is a re-run of the Madrid conference which ushered in the Oslo ‘peace’ process. The principal outcome of that was to reconfigure in the gullible western mind a genocidal project as a liberation movement, mightily arm the Palestinians with American and European money and enable them to slaughter more than a thousand Israeli innocents while reconfiguring Israel as the villain of the piece. But that whole process was due to the fact that, before 9/11, a lot of very silly people, including your predecessors, lived in cloud cuckoo-land.

One question, Mr President: what the hell has happened to you?