By Daniel Greenfield.., Sultan Knish..FrontPageMag
“War is peace,” entered our cultural vocabulary some sixty-four years ago. Around the same time that Orwell’s masterpiece was being printed up, an armistice was being negotiated between Israel and the Arab invading armies. That armistice began the long peaceful war or the warring peace.
The entire charade did not properly enter the realm of the Orwellian until the peace process began. The peace process between Israel and the terrorist militias funded by the countries of those invading armies has gone on for longer than most actual wars. It has also taken more lives than most actual wars.
War has an endpoint. Peace does not. A peace in which you are constantly at war can go on forever because while the enthusiasts of war eventually exhaust their patriotism, the enthusiasts of peace never give up on their peacemaking.
Warmongers may stop after a few thousand dead, but Peacemongers will pirouette over a million corpses.
As you read this, Obama is probably stumbling through some ceremony or speech in Israel. The speeches all say the usual things, but there really is only one purpose to the visit. There really ever only is one purpose to these visits. The revisiting of the endless peace war.
Two decades after the peace process has failed in every way imaginable. Two decades after cemeteries on both sides are full of the casualties of peace. Two decades which have created two abortive Palestinian states at war with one another and with Israel.
Two decades later, it’s still time for peace.
Peace time means that it’s time to ring up some more Israeli concessions in the hopes of getting the terrorists and their quarreling states back to the negotiating table for another photo op in the glorious album of peacemakers. And if the photos are properly posed, perhaps there will even be another Nobel Peace Prize in it for all the participants.
It would be nice to think that the peace disease was one of those viruses carried only in the bloodstream of liberals. But it’s not.
Every so often I am asked about a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab-Muslim conflict and the interrogators are baffled when I tell them that there is no solution. “No solution at all? But there has to be a solution. What of all the moderate voices of goodwill? What of all the mothers who only want to raise their children to sing happy songs about peace? What about all the old soldiers who are tired of war? What if we get them all in a room to shake hands and pose for photos? Then won’t there be peace?”
As society has become more progressive, it has become progressively more difficult to explain even even to intelligent people that the world simply does not work that way.
For two Cold War generations it was nearly impossible to communicate that there really would be no peace with the Soviet Union other than the cold kind maintained by a mutual balance of power. Their children and grand-children appear equally unequipped to understand that most serious wars end with either one side definitively losing and fundamentally changing as a result of that defeat or both sides maintaining a cold peace that will last only as long as neither side believes that it can squash the other with a surprise attack.
Israel did have peace until it began peace negotiations. It wasn’t a perfect peace, but aside from the minor problems of the Intifada, a comparative pinprick set against the violence that began after that infamous Rose Garden handshake, it was a good time whose like was then not seen again until Israel stopped playing peace process with the terrorists and learned to keep them away instead.
But the relative absence of violence, according to the amateur peacemakers, isn’t peace. A wartime peace isn’t what they want. What they want is a peacetime war. Let there be handshakes and suicide bombings. Let there be bloody bodies scraped off the sidewalk, but let there also be children’s choirs singing about peace. Let a thousand tombstones rise, so long as everyone can believe that peace is at hand.
This vulgar worship of peace as a religion, a creed that restores the faith of faithless men and women in humanity is a combination of empty sentimentality and calculated ignorance.
We must have peace in our time, the peacemakers say. And Israel must provide it. More territorial concessions must be put on the table. More goodwill must be shown. More ends must be bent over backward so that the peacemakers can stare at their televisions and sigh, their faith in the goodness of every man, woman, child and suicide bomber restored once again.
Who will Israel make peace with? President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, who hasn’t run for office since Hamas won the elections, doesn’t want to negotiate. Hamas only wants to negotiate a short-term pause in its campaign to destroy Israel. When he isn’t warring with Hamas, Abbas is declaring that he shares the same view on terrorism as Hamas.
Hamas or Abbas, whichever the peacemaker chooses will surely make him an ass.
But peacemakers don’t fancy details. They like the big picture. And the big picture is that there must be an answer. Tens of thousands demanded it in London before the war and Chamberlain delivered it to them. Peace arrived in our time, shortly before the Nazi bombers. Thousands more demanded it of every American president who faced a Communist thug across a negotiating table. And they got it.
There were nuclear treaties that meant nothing to the Soviets and that did not bring peace, but that made all the amateur peacemakers feel better about themselves. And then instead of peace coming across a negotiating table, the Soviet Union collapsed because a persnickety cowboy wouldn’t give up a missile defense program that every Harvard graduate knew could never work. And now, as another Harvard graduate proudly tries to take credit for Israel’s Iron Dome, they still know it can’t work.
Reagan didn’t end the Cold War with treaties; he ended it by doggedly pursuing superior firepower. And that is why in the name of peace, the Harvard grad looking over Iron Dome on his visit to Israel, has shown Russia his peaceful flexibility by abandoning the final stage of missile defense. Every Harvard grad knows that missile defense doesn’t bring peace. But what could anyone expect from Reagan? The poor dummy went to Eureka College. How could he know that defeating the USSR wouldn’t work?
Obama wants the same thing from Israel that he’s trying to get by selling out Poland on missile defense. Peace. While the only times Israel had any measure of peace is in the aftermath of a war, Harvard grads and the people who listen to them know that peace only comes about at the tail end of a long string of concessions and appeasement. And then when you have finally given your tormentor your house keys, your car keys and your lucky 2-dollar-bill, then having rifled through your empty pockets, he will finally nod grudgingly and agree to peace at last.
That is if he doesn’t actually want to kill you.
And that is the trouble with peacemakers; they don’t really take into account how to make peace with killers. Most countries lock up violent murderers when they kill a dozen people for fun. But when they kill a dozen people in order to liberate other killers or lay claim to a piece of land, then they are worth negotiating with. And the only outcome of the negotiations is establishing murder as a negotiating tactic.
Peace leads to war because peacemaking rewards the warmakers. It rewards the obstinate killers who refuse to stop killing. And the more it rewards them, the more they kill.
That is why Israel has been decades late in delivering the peace that all the amateur peacemakers want. Every time it phones Terrorism Inc. to place an order for peace with extra brotherhood on top, a suicide bomber pulls up to its front door. And so for two decades, in a pesky reality of peacemaking that none of the peacemakers care to hear about… peace has meant war.
Every time a new phase of the endless peace process is launched, more people die. More people die during the negotiations than otherwise. The peacemakers explain this by saying that the terrorists who aren’t at the negotiating table are trying to sabotage the terrorists who are at the negotiating table. The dead are sacrifices for peace and if Israel fights back against either group of terrorists, then it is guilty of obstructing the peace process which was otherwise going well.
So here we are with Obama t-shirts on sale to liberal American Jewish tourists in Jerusalem kiosks, a city whose Jewishness the man on the t-shirts will not recognize because it would harm the prospects for peace. And the question on their minds is how are we finally going to make peace happen.
The rational response is that peace simply isn’t going to happen. The two terrorist groups in their two states were set up for the sole purpose of destroying Israel. They are funded and supported by those countries that were attacking Israeli farmsteads with tanks around the time that Orwell was putting his final touches on “War is Peace, Slavery is Freedom and Ignorance is Strength.”
They are not going to stop trying to destroy Israel because it’s all they know and it’s their only reason for existence. And if that weren’t enough, they have spent generations teaching their children to hate and there is no sign whatsoever of them putting the brakes on the hate machine which expresses more clearly than anything else that they do not intend to stop fighting now or even twenty years from now.
Not when their educational system is busy training the suicide bomber of tomorrow.
But ignorance is a particular strength of peacemakers. They don’t want reasons why it can’t happen. Nor do they want to hear that the best kind of peace with people whose religion tells them that they will go to heaven if they die while cutting your throat is the heavily armed peace of cold iron and steel.
War is their peace and ignorance is their strength.
Link: http://sultanknish.blogspot.co.il/2013/03/a-bloody-endless-peace.html
@ yamit82:
Do you have Hawks, Falcons and Owls. I love to watch the hawks court,very romantic, they circle each other so closly that they almost touch wings,all time calling out very softly.
@ yamit82:
I can send coyotes, nothing like hearing them sing at night. Right now its mating season and they are busy tweeting one another.
@ yamit82:
There are reports of jaguars migrating up from Mexico. Beautiful animals. There is only one animal that really scares me ** mice! They are so dirty. You should find the song my adobe hacienda and translate it into Hebrew. I know you have prickly pear.
@ Honey Bee:
Except for coyotes we got enough scorpions both red and black varieties and vipers which are quicker and more deadly than rattlers.
We do have foxes
and
Big cats like leopards
@ Honey Bee:
Opps Alacranes, o Escorpiones
@ Honey Bee:
I shall send you some coyotes,rattlesnakes and alcanzares to compleat the experience
@ yamit82
You are a desert perrson,that is exactely what I love about the desert,but I never leave my window open when leave home.
Honey Bee Said:
I don’t think the almighty gets that personal.
I love the Negev, although I think sometimes it’s too dry, but I like the feeling of being close to nature and the feeling of space, cloudless blue skies and full moons that look close enough to touch.
@ yamit82:
Sounds like the Amighty was angry with you!!!!! My late Father was named Abraham!!!!! Do you like in the Negev, I like the dry places.
rongrand Said:
I left my house to go shopping on a clear sunny morning and when I was finished going out of the market the Sand/fine dust was so thick I couldn’t see past 20-30 ft. due to the sand it was dark as well. I had left windows open and by the time I got home my house and myself was covered in fine dust. Took me a few hours to clean the house from all of the dust.
Honey Bee Said:
Oh My!!
Honey Bee Said:
Maybe it’s because you aren’t Abraham?
Maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to?
@ yamit82:
Perhaps a whale will swallow him.
@ yamit82:
The Amighty has not whispered it in my ear at this time!
Liberman calls Turkey apology a ‘serious mistake’
Former FM says Netanyahu’s Obama-brokered reconciliation with Erdogan hurts Israel’s public image, bolsters radicals
“Former foreign minister Avigdor Liberman slammed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday for his decision to apologize to his Turkish counterpart for the “operational errors” made by Israel during the 2010 raid that led to Turkish fatalities on the Turkish-registered, Gaza-bound ship Mavi Marmara.
“Israel’s apology for the soldiers activity against a terrorist organization is a serious mistake,” said Liberman, who served as Israel’s top diplomat during the height of the crisis with Turkey, and who is also Netanyahu’s No. 2 in their joint Knesset Likud-Beytenu faction.”
Canadian Otter Said:
This was I think the first part:
US unblocks $500 million in aid to Palestinians
State Dept. announces move on the heels of Obama’s visit to Israel, West Bank; US president asks Abbas to avoid ICC, says report, Apparently Obama needed to soften Congress up to allow the allocation to go through, I’m sure that eas a consideration for the trip besides sticking BB’s head in a vice to extract the apology.
Obama offers additional $200 million to aid Jordan
The country’s economic troubles have worsened since more than 450,000 refugees crossed the border to flee violence in neighboring Syria
Obama is a big spender. His trip has cost the American tax payers so far as we know almost $2 billion in direct and indirect giveaways and actual costs.
Honey Bee Said:
Finish your thought.
Canadian Otter Said:
Eldad is watching Whales in Southern Argentina. He is on an extended vacation.
@ Canadian Otter:
Perhaps Israel apologized for not killing ALL of the terrorists… I can dream…
Netanyahu apologizes to Turkey for the killing of terrorists aboard the Turkish Marmara, the same terrorists who were trying to murder Israeli commandos. I heard it on NPR, confirmed by RT and Fox news. Nothing on Israeli English media yet. This after repeated reassurances by the PM that he would never, ever apologize to Turkey.
Is this what Israel apologizes for?
Israel on its knees begging for financial aid. Israel on its knees apologizing to a virulently anti-Semitic regime.
Your politicians are to blame for the complete lost of respect for the state of Israel throughout the world, by friends and foes alike.
Is this the first unofficial instalment in payment for Obama’s military aid?
@ yamit82:
@ rongrand:
And G-d spoke to Obama from out of thw Whirlwind!!!!!!!
I eagerly clicked on a video about Otzma Leyisrael (the faction that split from National Union and lost) under the headline “Otzma Continues the Fight Outside the Knesset”. ~~~ I was hoping to find a reinvigorated party, a magnet for dissatisfied voters. What I found instead was a video interview with a tired- and ailing-sounding elderly man, struggling with bad English. An old activist with an ambiguous reputation. Why not a representative of the vigourous youth, or someone with a solid reputation such as Eldad or Ben Ari? http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166480 –
Which brings me to one of my favorite paranoid themes: Are true Zionist movements being deliberately sabotaged from the inside? ~~~ Why is it that so many attempts at organized activism fizzle? ~~~ Why is it that the Fake Right Wing has such success dividing, obscuring or swallowing up smaller attempts by real nationalists? ~~~ Why is it that such clear issues as Israel’s legal ownership of Yesha, African illegals raping Jews, Arabs terrorizing motorists – are routinely shunted aside? ~~~ It’s like watching a giant magicians show. Voters even elected a party with a secret platform – the Likud. ~~~ Old nationalists get distracted by yearly conferences, and youth are sent to plant trees or build shacks. In other places they incarcerate people with patriotic ideas. In Israel they send them out to play. Or undermine and seed confusion within their weak attempts at organizing.
@ yamit82:
Sand storms, Divine intervention cleansing the area ovomit walked.
1 Israeli tourist and a Belgian were kidnapped in Sinai by Bedouins.
Obama has not yet left Israel we are experiencing heavy sand storms all over the country.
In addition to the excellent points made by Daniel Greenfield on the “peacemakers,” I have observed that they are transforming into violent “peacemakers.”
One could understand pacifists and do-goobers and meddlers who abhor war and want an end to all war – they might not understand that mindless unilateral declarations of peace and goodwill lead to more war and terrorism when you are dealing with terrorists who are true believers in Koranic commands. However, there has been a growing trend among activists who are becoming part of militant actions and allowing themselves to be used by terror states to gain more credibility in the eyes of the international community.
Indeed, we have one or two such activists in our community who, perhaps with the help of radical Iranian friends and with the United Church funding their larger group, have made visits to Iran as stooges and propaganda agents for the violent Iranian totalitarian state. These were people who, no longer satisfied with the dull work of encouraging people not to buy Ahava and other products from Israel, have made the leap to become agents of and soft terrorists for the Iranian regime.
And it seems that many of the people who purport to want only peace, armed with reams of excuses and sympathetic entreaties, overlook violence among Islamic terrorists. Now they have actually joined forces with these terrorists whose political arms are reaching out for such brainwashed people, fueled by the hate they have for Jews. The home bases in Gaza and Iran and Saudi provide them with the propaganda, the instructions and funding (some which comes legitimately through the university from the millions spent by the Arab states on student groups, donations and “Chairs,” etc.). They have weak leftist university presidents and faculty slobbering all over the benefactors, looking to satisfy their every demand – not hesitating to maintain a simmering war against Israel on campus similar to the “peace process” that Greenfield describes so well.
The peace process and peace activism is now a violent theatrical process where the passionate words of peace do not match the intent nor the actions of participants – just as Orwell portrayed. The participants have chosen sides against Israel and against Jews and are growing more violent as they become the terrorists working with other terrorists such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran.