Jay Nordlinger has made his annual pilgrimage to the World Economic Forum in Davos and begun filing his on-the-scene reports. In part 2, Jay quotes extensively from Secretary Rice’s well-received speech. The speech is available in its entirety here both in text and video.
Jay quotes extensively from the speech, pausing only to provide his mostly approving comments, with the occasional arched eyebrow. And there are good things in the speech. Yet Bush administration diplomacy has reached Clintonian dead ends in Iran, North Korea and the Palestinian Authority. Rice’s efforts to create a Palestinian state seem to me the reductio ad absurdum of her post-9/11 Clintonism in several respects that I have previously noted here.
Rice now devotes herself to the creation of a Palestinian state that would inevitably constitute a terrorist enclave. Elsewhere she likens the cause of Palestinian statehood to the cause of civil rights for American blacks (such as in this 2006 speech and again in private remarks at the Annapolis conference). Yesterday the Ralph Abernathy of the Palestinan Authority declared a three-day mourning period to honor the passing of terrorist maestro George Habash, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine:
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas plans to set up a mourner’s tent within the Muqata compound in Ramallah to receive those mourning the death of the Palestinian leader. Abbas also order[ed] all Palestinian flags flying above PA buildings to be lowered to half-mast.
Among other of the PFLP’s greatest hits was the 1976 Air France hijacking that ended up in Entebbe. Habash of course broke with the Martin Luther King of the Palestinan cause over the Oslo Accords, setting up shop in Damascus to go into business with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
In her Davos remarks, Rice addressed the knotty problem of Hamas:
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