Israel Matzav

Obama misses Fatah's message

Caroline Glick argues that the Fatah Congress in Bethlehem this week sent a very clear message to the Obama administration. But President Obumbler and his gang of Kumbaya-singing Leftists don't want to hear it.

Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas's decision to remove both his own mask and that of his organization should cause the Netanyahu government to reassess its current policies toward the group. For the past four months, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his government have quietly barred all Jewish construction in eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem neighborhoods, as well as in Judea and Samaria. The government's unofficial policy has been implemented in the hopes of pleasing the Obama administration, which argues that by barring Jewish building, Israel will encourage the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority to moderate its policies and so engender an atmosphere conducive to a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian conflict with Israel. The Fatah conference put paid to that fiction.

Fatah's message to the Netanyahu government is important. But even more important is the message it conveys to the Obama administration. For Netanyahu, the Fatah gathering bore out his prior assessment that the group is a wolf in sheep's clothing. For US President Barack Obama, the message of the Fatah conclave was that his administration's assumptions not only about Fatah, but about terrorists and terror-supporting regimes in general are completely wrong.

FOR THE Obama administration, Fatah was supposed to be the poster child for moderate terrorists. Fatah was supposed to be the prototype of the noble terrorist organization that really just wants respect. It was supposed to be the group that proved the central contention of the Obama White House's strategy for dealing with terror, namely, that all terrorists want is to be appeased.

But over the past week in Bethlehem, Fatah's leaders said they will not be appeased. To the international community whose billions of dollars in aid money and boundless goodwill and political support they have pocketed over the past decade and a half they sent a clear message. They remain an implacable terror group devoted to the physical annihilation of Israel.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration is already making clear that it is incapable of accepting this basic truth. As Abbas and his cronies were exposing their true nature in Bethlehem, Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, was giving a speech in Washington where he demonstrated the administration's ideological inflexibility.

...

Building on the false Fatah model of appeasable terrorists, Brennan indicated that the Obama administration believes that Hizbullah is well on its way to becoming a respectable political actor. As he sees it, simply by participating in Lebanon's political process, the Iranian proxy has earned the right to be viewed as a legitimate political force. Brennan cited the fact that in addition to active terrorist elements, Hizbullah members today include "members of parliament, in the cabinet; [and] there are lawyers, doctors, others who are part of the Hizbullah organization" as a reason to celebrate the group. He further claimed that Hizbullah members who are not actively involved in terrorism "are in fact renouncing that type of terrorism and violence and are trying to participate in the political process in a very legitimate fashion."

...

All of this makes clear that in spite of its reasonable desire to reach a deal with the Obama White House, the Netanyahu government must abandon any plans to do so. The Post reported this week that the government is now negotiating a six-month extension of its unofficial ban on Jewish construction in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria with US officials. These negotiations must be ended immediately.

Read the whole thing.

Glick is right. For the Obama administration to admit that terrorists cannot be appeased would be to admit that its worldview is invalid. It would mean admitting that the only way to deal with Iran is militarily. It would mean that the only way to deal with the 'Palestinians' is to manage the conflict - or defeat them in an all-out war. The Obama administration will never admit those things, and therefore it is closing its ears to the message sent by Fatah this week.

Kumbaya.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:12 PM