Can George Mitchell bring it? I doubt it. As the article notes, the comparison of Hamas to the IRA is spurious, and the Democrats in general, including George Mitchell, seem to think that it’s possible to engage in diplomacy with someone whose goal, and in fact primary motivation in life, is to kill you. What does that “dialogue” look like? What would be the “compromise”? That only half the Jews go into the sea?

I have a piece up at PJM today on the revival of the old cult of child sacrifice in the Middle East.

First time as tragedy, second time as tragedy again — Europe’s continuing estrangement from Israel:

I am standing in a queue waiting to buy a train ticket from London to Canterbury. A well-dressed lady standing behind me informs her friend that she “can’t wait till Israel disappears off the face of the earth.” What struck me was not her intense hostility to Israel but the mild-mannered, matter-of-fact tone with which she announced her wish for the annihilation of a nation. It seems that it is okay to condemn and demonize Israel. All of a sudden Israel has become an all-purpose target for a variety of disparate and confused causes. When I ask a group of Pakistani waiters sitting around a table in their restaurant why they “hate” Israel, they casually tell me that it is because Jews are their “religion’s enemy.” Those who are highly educated have their own pet prejudice. One of my young colleagues who teaches media studies in a London-based university was taken aback during a seminar discussion when some of her students insisted that since all the banks are owned by Jews, Israel was responsible for the current global financial crisis.

It’s looking like the 1930s again in more ways than one. Let’s hope it ends better this time.

The left has been pretending to support the war in Afghanistan ever since we went into Iraq, as a cudgel against the Bush administration. Obama himself played that game. Well, now that he’s got the keys to the White House, and the actual responsibility for foreign policy, what will he (and they) do?

Armed Liberal explains:

As I never tire of reminding people, the disparity in power between Israel and the Palestinian proto-states (and the entire Arab world) is immense, driven in large part by the cultural gap between the westernized Israelis and the balance of the Middle East.

I’m no expert, but I have to believe that the day Israel gets tired of this stalemate and simply starts playing by Hama rules, it will be a matter of days before there simply are no more Palestinian people.

And here’s the problem – the same problem I’ve worried about since 2001. How do we prevent this from seeming like a good idea?

Well, the strongest way is for Israel to know that it’s not alone.

And we’re doing a worse and worse job of that.

I also think that Joe Katzman’s comment about the Juan Coles of the world is spot on:

You assume that the hatred of people like Juan Cole is rational.

If Israel falls, and million of Jews are murdered, Cole and his ilk will just smirk and enjoy the victory their Islamist friends have won.

If Israel wipes out the Palestinians, it serves as full justification to them for all the loony things they blieve about Western Civilization (and the Jews), and in their minds they were the “heroes” who tired to stop it. On some level, I suspect they may desire this; it fits their ideological fantasies too well. The fact that [they] would have done a fair [b]it to cause the situation will not, of course, be allowed to enter their minds.

So, their position is one in which nothing of theirs is held at risk, and either way they “win.”

Logic is not relevant to any of this. Only the hate that animates them.

And there are far too many of them, particularly in Europe.

The voting for best Middle-East/Africa blog is pretty much down to Juan Cole and Michael Totten. Please don’t sully the award by allowing Cole to win.

Something I just noticed, which is typical of leftists — false advertising. From the Bolsheviks (no, they weren’t really the majority), to “progressives” and “liberals” and support of “appropriate technology,” they have to steal a base with their misleading (to be polite) names. Not to mention, of course, Democratic. “Informed Comment” is just the latest (and even more presumptuous than usual) in the sham names.

Mark Steyn, on the new fashionable anti-semitism.

Abraham Miller says that Tocqueville would have recognized what is going on in Gaza quite well:

…there is the constituency comprised of those groups who are so wedded to the embrace of victims — real and imaginary — that the most despicable violence is not an act of evil, but a cause for investigation; a statement written in desperate measures by desperate people. Once a group such as Hamas has been defined as a victim, then its acts have to be explored, dissected, explained, rationalized, put into a context, but never condemned. Victims are, by such groups’ definitions, incapable of evil.

For four decades I have been attending forums on the Middle East conducted by liberal church congregations, colleges and universities, self-anointed peace and justice groups, and the usual gaggle of what are referred to as “the good people.” These people and their groups are intrinsic to the terrorists’ strategy. Their rationales for terrorist violence are vital to the continued use of violence. These so-called “good people” are the conduit to evil, and they are invariably self-proclaimed “progressives” or “liberals.”

All terrorist groups want people who will ask, “Why?” They want people who have long ago forsaken moral judgments for moral relativism. They want the guy who will stand up at the PTA meeting and say, “9/11 is the result of our foreign policy,” and not conceive of the possibility that he is uttering a cliché he could not intellectually defend, but think he is being profound.

It is not just that such people, by justifying violence, contribute to the continued perpetuation of violence, but also by being partisans for evil, they have given up the claim to be honest brokers for peace. In the case of liberal church groups, they have become so supportive of Palestinian terrorism that they would be incapable of being a broker for serious engagements or dialogues for peace. Does anyone think that the leadership of the Presbyterian Church, for example, exudes any moral authority when it comes to the Middle East? They are simply another militia, albeit one that justifies other people doing the killing they tacitly support.

They’re not anti-war. They’re just on the other side.