You can fool American Jews most of the time. . .
and we're about to find if you can fool us all of the time. David Bedein in FrontPageMagazine calls out John Kerry's newly appointed Middle East advisor, Martin Indyk. According to Bedein, "The very mention of Indyk, who served two stints as ambassador to Israel, sends shudders down the spine of senior members of the Israel defense and foreign policy establishment. For the past year, Indyk, in his new capacity as the head of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, has conducted a campaign to dispatch U.S. troops to intervene in the Middle East conflict. Indyk has gone so far as to say that the U.S. should sent troops or create a protectorate over the West Bank and Gaza. Such a step would place the U.S. in a virtual state of war with the Israeli army, which has always viewed some of the West Bank and Gaza as vital to the security concerns of the state of Israel."
Bedein also shows that Indyk "has been working for years to garner American support for Yasser Arafat and his terrorist regime." Indeed, Indyk "is generally looked upon as the man who planned the Oslo process that gave Yassir Arafat and the PLO armed control over most of the Palestinian Arab population." Bedein shows that, since Oslo, Indyk has repeatedly provided cover for Arafat while the wily terrorist violated his commitment to cancel the PLO's covenant to eradicate the Jewish state and then launched the second intifada. For example, "in late November 2000, when Israel issued a 'white paper' on intercepted intelligence from Arafat’s headquarters that showed documentary evidence that Arafat and his mainstream PLO gangs were indeed facilitating the campaign of terror, Indyk made a special trip to Jerusalem to demand that the Israeli government withdraw its report. Indyk had just reported to the U.S. Congress that the Palestinian groups organizing the terror campaign were NOT under Arafat’s control."
Read the whole thing, if you have the stomach for it.
HINDROCKET adds: This is of a piece with Kerry's whole foreign policy, isn't it? That is, wishful thinking as foreign policy. Kerry gave a speech today in which he blamed President Bush for creating Islamofascist terrorists. We've been provoking them, apparently. For a really, really, long time. Just like Israel: surely, if only Israel would stop defending itself, the Palestinians would see the light and behave reasonably. The world would be so much more manageable if our enemies, instead of being murderous, self-motivated fanatics, were merely reacting to our (or Israel's) foreign policy "mistakes." Were that the case, we could make the whole problem go away by tweaking our foreign policy a bit. Wishful thinking--it's always a temptation.
Whether Kerry really believes this nonsense is unknowable, but his choice of Indyk as a key adviser is not encouraging. More fundamentally, though, Kerry's current worldview, as expressed in his public statements as well as his appointments, is consistent with the perspective he formed on Vietnam (there is no evidence that his thinking has advanced since 1971). That is: there never would have been a problem, except for us.
