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"Palestine" Touches Bottom

(Jerusalem Post) Bret Stephens - The idea that Palestinian desperation gave birth to suicide bombers persists. However, as Time magazine points out, today's typical suicide bomber "is Izzadin Masri, the 23-year-old son of a prosperous restaurant owner... [or] Ayat Akhras, 18, a straight-A student, just months away from graduation and then a marriage." Despair? What it is, rather, is some combination of religious belief, social faddishness and cultural mystique, the absence of any countervailing cultural institutions, and a political leadership that not only does nothing to resist the trend, but paves the way toward it. As historian Michael Oren points out, Palestinians have outdone even the Nazis in their glorification of murder. The Nazis, he notes, "never publicly lionized [the Einsatzgruppen], never plastered their pictures on the streets or openly encouraged children to emulate. That kind of adoration for mass murderers can only be found, in abundance, among the Palestinians." I am often asked whether I favor an independent Palestinian state. I wish someone would ask me instead whether I favor an independent German one. I favor an independent Germany, of course, but not if it's going to be the Third Reich. Until the Palestinians emerge from the moral swamp in which they have put themselves, they ought to remain stateless.
2003-01-17 00:00:00
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