Originally published at Rubin Reports.

There’s something very strange about this alleged new Arab League peace initiative and I find no serious addressing of these issues in the media coverage. A step toward efforts by Arab states to move toward proposing a possible peace with Israel is a good thing. Especially touted is an idea, mentioned by Qatar’s representative at the Washington meeting, to accept an agreement that small border modifications could be made to the pre-1967 lines.

Here’s how the Associated Press reported on this, with the headline, “Arab League sweetens Israel-Palestinian peace plan“:

The Arab League’s decision to sweeten its decade-old proposal offering comprehensive peace with Israel has placed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a bind and swiftly exposed fissures in his new government.

In other words, you’d have to be a fool or a knave to reject this deal and the issue has divided Israel’s government. Yet chief negotiator Tzipi Livni was right to have reacted positively to the proposal and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be right to ultimately reject it.

After all, there are a lot of unaddressed points in the coverage that make me strongly suspect that this is a public relations’ stunt to convince America and Western opinion that the Arab states want peace with Israel when not all of them do so.

And that’s one of the key questions. At the meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry there were representatives of the Arab League, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian Authority.

But Arab League bureaucrats can’t agree on anything. Only a vote of the Arab League’s almost two dozen members can establish an official position. So this was not an Arab League plan at all. To represent it as an official Arab position is, then, untrue.

Indeed, we already know that the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) opposes this formula. At any rate, the United States cannot even get the P.A. to negotiate with Israel and yet fantasies of comprehensive peace are spread around by it. The mass media is cooperating in this theme, seeking to make Kerry look good at least.

Then there is the list of countries involved. I have no difficulty in believing that the governments of Bahrain, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia are ready for a deal. Jordan has already made peace; Saudi Arabia proposed a reasonable offer a decade ago a decade ago (before it was sharply revised by hardliners before becoming an official Arab League position), and Bahrain’s regime is desperately afraid of Iran and has become a semi-satellite of the Saudis.

But what about the other three countries? Are we to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt, the Hizballah-dominated regime in Lebanon, and the quirky but pro-Hamas and pro-Muslim Brotherhood regime in Qatar have suddenly reversed everything that they have been saying in order to seek a compromise peace with Israel? Highly doubtful to say the least.

In other words, the reportage ignored the interesting detail about the three most radical regimes (Qatar’s regional policy is radical; not its domestic policies) suddenly making a concession to Israel that had been previously unthinkable? It’s sort of like taking for granted, say, Joseph Stalin’s supposed embrace of capitalism or France’s rulers proclaiming that American culture is far superior to their own.

And let’s also remember the radical forces not present. The Syrian rebels will be holding the Arab League seat are dominated by Islamists. Hamas itself, which governs the Gaza Strip, will refuse to abide by any such agreement. Remember that this group represents at least one-third of Palestinians and perhaps a plurality over Fatah, which governs the P.A. Tunisia’s Muslim Brotherhood-dominated leadership have even written into the country’s new constitution that it can never make peace with Israel!.

Finally, there is a curious lack of mention over the demand, enshrined in the previous “Arab Peace Initiative” about what is called the “right of return.” Namely, to satisfy P.A. demands Israel would have to accept the immigration of hundreds of thousands of passionately anti-Israel Palestinians who had lived in the country 60 years ago (or their descendants) and who have been fighting all that time to wipe Israel off the map.

Political metaphors may simplify or symbolize actual or anticipated events but take a toll on political responsibility and sincerity. Throughout history, including the “line in the dirt” challenge of Colonel William Travis in March 1836 at the Alamo, lines have been drawn in the sand as indicators of intentions or actions. Individuals since Julius Caesar, who in January 49 B.C. violated the rule that Roman generals were forbidden to bring their troops into the territory of the Roman Empire and invaded with his army from the area of Gaul, have taken decisive action and crossed the Rubicon.

The most recent metaphor in American politics is the “red line,” supposedly a stronger warning than these other metaphors that an action or behavior will not be tolerated. A “line” is more definite and durable than “sand” or the flowing Rubicon, and has an analogy with a geographical line. The present dilemma for President Barack Obama, and to a lesser extent for Hillary Clinton, who in August 2012 similarly spoke of a red line but now is no longer secretary of state, stems from his use of this metaphor on a number occasions regarding Syria.

The problem for Obama is that in August 2012 he unequivocally said the use of chemical weapons by Syria would be a “red line for us…. There would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front, or the use of chemical weapons. That would change my calculus, or calculations, significantly.”

Of course one can appreciate, as Obama said to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, that though information has filtered out in Syria, “we have to make sure that we know exactly what happened… I think having the facts before you act is very important.” This was clearly a not very subtle reference to the actions of President George W. Bush in justifying the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 because of the information of supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the country, information that turned out to be inaccurate or not corroborated.

It is understandable that no imminent attack is envisaged or that quick military action against Syria is improbable, or perhaps has never been contemplated by Obama. Yet there are real problems with Obama’s position and lack of action following the rhetoric. First, there is the refusal to admit that the existing facts made known so far justify that action. Although three countries, Britain, France, and Israel, as well as U.S. intelligence agencies, have declared that chemical weapons have been used in Syria on at least two occasions, and Secretary of State John Kerry said they had been used in Aleppo and near Damascus, the Obama administration still maintains that this is insufficient confirmation.

Reservations about Syrian actions were expressed with cautious nonchalance by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel on April 25, 2013 when he stated that “The U.S. intelligence community assesses with some degree of varying confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria.” Secretary Hagel still had “uncertainties about what was used, what kind of chemicals was used, when it was used, who used it.”

Obama has been even more reserved. The mantra, often repeated concerning Iran, that “all options are on the table,” is now applied to Syria. But Obama’s utterances of the last week suggest otherwise. It has long been clear that Syria has chemical weapons — sarin, mustard gas, and other military-grade agents that attack the respiratory and nervous systems. But a problem regarding Obama’s position is that sarin gas, a nerve agent that can be found in human tissue, dissipates within a short time. Asking for more time to investigate and find evidence thus is less likely to lead to success.

Nevertheless, Obama on April 26, 2013 said he was responding “prudently” and “deliberately” to evidence that Syria had used chemical weapons. Using language — “prudence” and “deliberate assessment” — more like that of Edmund Burke than of a liberal Democrat, Obama was seeking further proof of culpability for the chemical attacks. In view of the refusal of the Syrian government to allow United Nations inspectors or the head of the U.N. agency for disarmament into the country, a refusal backed by Russia, it is difficult to see how the indisputable proof can be found. In his conversation with the King of Jordan on April 26, the president spoke of the need to obtain more direct evidence and confirmation of this “potential” use of chemical weapons.

It has been clear to me for a long time that the United States is just posturing and not a real world power.  It has no do or die principles and its recent military successes were a long time ago or not worth bragging about.

Most worrisome is the fact that instead of eliminating the Iranian nuclear industry American officials at best  just mumble about letting Israel, one of the smallest countries in the world, “take care of it” if Israel really feels in danger.  Duh!  Iran is anti-American even more than anti-Israel.  For Americans to rationalize that and lie to themselves that Iran would only use weapons against Israel is totally unrealistic and very dangerous.

In Israel Hayom, David Weinberg wrote of how the Americans are hoping to ignore the dangers of Iran to world peace.

Now, Pickering is back at the head of a panel of former senior U.S. officials and outside experts called “The Iran Project,” urging U.S. President Barack Obama to drop sanctions and covert action against Iran, and instead negotiate more intensively with Tehran.

“I fundamentally believe that the balance between sanctions and diplomacy has been misaligned,” says Pickering. He and his colleagues (who at the time included Chuck Hagel, now defense secretary) write that the sanctions policy seems to be backfiring and has “contributed to an increase in repression and corruption within Iran.” They worry that sanctions “may be sowing the seeds of long-term alienation between the Iranian people and the United States.”

In an interview with The New York Times, Pickering also contends that Obama should review the covert program against Iran — which reportedly has included computer sabotage of its nuclear facilities — to “stop anything that is peripheral, that is not buying us much time” in slowing Iran’s progress.

The United States is reverting to its pre-World War Two isolationist mode.  The United States had hoped that it wouldn’t be “dragged into” war with Hitler.  It tried being accommodating, and there were many prominent Americans who didn’t find Hitler problematic.  They certainly didn’t mind his anti-Semitism.

At the Jerusalem Post’s NY Conference, Former Mossad Chief Meir Dagan stated that:

To threaten an immediate attack on Iran is not beneficial to Israel… It transferred the Iranian issue from a worldwide issue to an Israeli issue. I would have been happier had [U.S. President Barack] Obama made his announcement that he would not let Iran get nuclear weapons in Riyadh and not in Jerusalem.

I must admit that I don’t agree with much else that Dagan stated.  He’s total unrealistic when it comes to the chance of “peace” with Arab terrorists.

When you look at the big picture, it’s clear that the Arab terrorism that targets Israelis is also related to the Arab and Islamic terrorism that can be found even in the United States, such as the Boston Marathon bombing.

It’s a very dangerous mistake that Israel is accepting foreign advice/instructions/ideology to do everything it can to make peace with the Arab Terrorists.  It is totally impossible to make peace with terrorists.  Consider it against their religion!

The bottom line is that the world is in big trouble!

Visit Shiloh Musings.

Originally published at Rubin Reports.

“I know what the world thinks of us, we are Communists, and of course I have said very clearly that we are not Communists; very clearly.” –Fidel Castro, 1959

U.S. policy toward Syria has changed but it is too late. A senior State Department official said at the meeting just concluded of opposition groups: “We have to help the moderates, people like [Chief of Staff of the Free Syrian Army] Salim Idris….”

This is what I proposed two years ago but I have to admit that I almost never saw anyone else who suggested that the strategy should be to help the non-Islamists with money, weapons and diplomatic support.

Unlike Castro, the Islamists in Syria never lied about their goals and ideologies. Now the Islamists are far more powerful and well-armed than anyone else, courtesy of U.S. policy. Oh and there’s one more problem. Many or most of the Free Syrian Army’s troops, that is the supposed non- or anti-Islamist alternative, are also Muslim Brotherhood supporters.

So what’s there to do with revolutionary Islamists controlling Syria and sooner or later, though it might take a couple of years, taking over the whole country or at least gaining recognition as the legitimate government of Syria while the regime holds out in the northwest of the country?

That’s okay, says the main line of U.S. policy. We don’t care if they are America-hating fanatics who want to impose Sharia, suppress or even massacre Christians, and commit genocide against Jews. Just as long as they aren’t affiliated with al Qaeda.

Beyond this, there’s mostly wishful thinking. Compare these statements by a Turkish diplomat and a Saudi newspaper:

“Once Assad is gone, al Qaeda won’t stay long in Syria.”

“We know that there are radical forces like [al Qaeda] but do not overestimate them.”

But it seems impossible to get the mainstream debate to recognize the fact that the problem is not merely al Qaeda but other radical Salafists and another Muslim Brotherhood government.

What kind of situation would another Egypt bring about in the Middle East?

What will happen within Syria which historically is a far more radical entity (for historical, political culture, and geopolitical reasons) than Egypt? What will be the fate of all those modern-oriented women, liberals, Alawites, Christians, Druze, and Kurds?

Going beyond the largely worthless current debate on Syria let’s look ahead into the seemingly inevitable future. We can reasonably assume that the Assad regime might last another year or two but it will either retreat to the Alawite areas by then or have fallen totally. There is by the way another possibility. Rebels make advances in Damascus, then use the opportunity to announce the establishment of a provisional government there. The United States and other countries then recognize it–despite Assad’s continuing hold on much of the country–as the legitimate government of Syria.

Whatever happens, there will be a Muslim Brotherhood regime in Syria and Obama will support it. The Salafis will not rule but they will kill people, intimidate non- or anti-Islamist forces, and probably be the main force in various local areas of the country.

Many conservatives and Republicans favor more intervention which means in practice working even harder to install an Islamist regime in Syria. That’s a terrible idea. With few exceptions they never seem to grasp the point about supporting the non-Islamist forces and not just the Syrian rebels in general as if they were glorious freedom fighters.

A few other people favor supporting the Assad dictatorship to keep the Islamists out of power. (Note: These were suggested prior to reports about the regime’s use of chemical weapons). This is another terrible idea. Aside for morality and the impossibility of saving Assad, no Western country is going to adopt such a policy. Whatever its past, the Assad regime had in effect become an Islamist regime, a Shia Islamist regime, and its fall will weaken Iran and Hizballah.

The problem, of course, is that its fall will also strengthen the Sunni Islamists. According to estimates by my colleague, Dr. Jonathan Spyer:

Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al Qaeda, has about 6,000 fighters. The Syrian Islamic Front (dominated by Ahrar al-Sham) has about 13,000 fighters. And, the Syrian Islamic Liberation Front, which seems close to the Muslim Brotherhood, (including the Farouq Brigade of Homs; Suqour al-Sham of Idleb, and Tawhid Brigade of Aleppo) has about 40,000 fighters.

“The lights are going out in the enlightenment” Professor Barry Rubin told The Jewish Press in an interview this week.  “Too many reporters have no interest in reporting accurately, too many professors have no interest in speaking accurately, and too many policy makers have no interest in promulgating responsible policy.”

Rubin was talking about the reluctance to name revolutionary Islamism – Rubin calls this the “mysterious motivation,” and he refuses to be cowed into playing that avoidance game.

Rubin wrote a very important article about this after he watched the mainstream media and Western politicos twist themselves into pretzels in an effort to avoid the obvious. Rubin explains that the West seems to believe that if we admit the ideology and movement of  Islamism threatens Western society, that will have radical implications for our worldview.

As a result, Rubin points out, most current policy makers and opinion shapers prefer to avoid any policy that considering Islamism as the motive for terrorism would necessitate.  The fear of short term pain is indulged at the expense of preventing the real danger that will follow.  And we are being lied to – “albeit for virtuous reasons” – by the politicians and the mainstream press.

What is the fear which leads to the conclusion that “doing nothing has become better than doing anything”? The fear is that speaking the truth: that the Tsarnaev brothers acted in accordance with their (or at least the older brother’s) understanding, as well as that of many Muslims, of what Islam requires will lead to disaster.  It will cause widespread hatred of Muslims to be unleashed, the specter of Islamophobia to spread, racism will again become rampant, and all the things that a hoped-for post-racist America tried to put behind it will again spread throughout the land.

But the failure to take Islam into consideration might be the very reason why, despite the warning the U.S. was given by Russia that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “a radical Muslim and a strong believer” the U.S. nonetheless watched Tsarnaev leave the country for Russia and allowed the case file on him to expire during the time Tsarnaev was in a heavily radicalized Muslim territory of Russia, and why other terrorists have also been able to launch attacks.

In a telephone interview from his home in Tel Aviv, The Jewish Press spoke with Rubin, the director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal.  Rubin is the author of more than two dozen books on topics including terrorism, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, the PLO, Israel, the Middle East and Islam, which have been published by the most esteemed publishing houses including the Oxford, Yale, Harvard and Cambridge University presses.

First Rubin lists off and explains the many ways the Tsarnaev brothers’ “mysterious motive” to maim and murder Americans has been and continues to be aggressively obfuscated. The list includes fingers pointed at a troubled youth; the Chechen code of honor; immigrants’ malaise; and unemployment.  Read his article, it is well worth seeing how he lays out this case.

Rubin then flips to the other side, and explores the justifications used to avoid saying Islamic extremism is a motivating factor in terrorism generally, and was so in the Boston Marathon Bombings specifically.

These reasons fall primarily into two groups; the first, that by linking the act of terrorism with Islam, even the movement of Islamism, it will unleash a wave of Islamophobic violence, and two, that such attacks are really our (that is, that of the U.S. and of the West) fault.

Rubin, an honest-to-goodness liberal (not “progressive”) finds these lists of false motivations and obviously flawed self-blame theories not just foolish, but dangerous.

A variant of the “you can’t link Islam to terrorism” problem is to insist that the only kind of Islamist strategic threat dangerous to the United States is the one that emanates from al Qaeda.

“If it isn’t al Qaeda, it supposedly isn’t our problem,” is how Rubin described to The Jewish Press this refusal to look directly at the problem.  “In Syria, for example, up to three dozen radical Islamist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, have received arms due to U.S. supported policies but only one – the direct affiliate to al Qaeda – is barred from this program,” Rubin said.

The connection between Islamism and terrorism has to be dealt with forthrightly – sometimes the motivation for a terrorist act will be Islamist terrorism, and sometimes it won’t be, but when it is and we avoid naming it, we are setting ourselves up for a continuation, a metastases of the problem.

AMERICAN MUSLIMS AREN’T COWED

Everyone’s favorite bad guy – because in his charming Elvis impersonator way he was not scary and was, without any doubt, a lone actor – is no longer in custody.  Because, it appears, he was framed.

Paul Kevin Curtis, the man arrested on April 17 for sending ricin-laced letters to U.S. President Barack Obama, Senator Roger Wicker (R-MISS) and a Mississippi state judge, was released from custody on Tuesday, April 23.

Late Tuesday afternoon it was announced by U.S. Attorney Felicia Adams that the charges against Curtis were dropped, citing “new information” that has been uncovered.

On Monday, authorities had reported that no ricin residue was found in either Curtis’ home or car, nor did they find any searches on his computer for how to make the poison, or any tools in his home that could have been used in making it.

Curtis, an Elvis impersonator from Corinth, Mississippi, was arrested last week and charged with sending a threat to the president, after letters containing the poison triggered security scares around Washington.

According to the attorney for Curtis, the letters used phrases Curtis uses on social media.  The letters ended with the phrase, “I am KC and I approve this message,” according to CNN.

In a rambling speech captured on video, Curtis described his desire to return to “normal life,” after his incarceration.  The speech included hopes for the rekindling of his stalled music career, mentions of his favorite charities and the fact that he wants to “slow down and end abortions.”   He also mentioned that when he was first approached by the authorities and they mentioned “ricin,” he thought they said “rice,” and he told them he doesn’t eat it.

“I respect President Obama and love my country. I would never do anything to pose a threat to him or any other U.S. official,” Paul Kevin Curtis said during Tuesday’s news conference.

After Curtis was released, authorities searched the home of another Mississippi man, J. Everett Dutschke.  Dutschke and Curtis have apparently been involved in an ongoing feud for years.

Two out of three governments agree that dealing with terrorism is all about having the right attitude. That, “Yes, we’ve been bombed, but we’re ready to pick ourselves up and get on with our lives without drawing any conclusions from what happened,” attitude that politicians patriotically advocate as soon as the carnage is over.

“Americans refuse to be terrorized. Ultimately, that’s what we’ll remember from this week,” Obama said in his radio address.

But of course Americans were terrorized. Obama’s message is that in response to the terrorism, Bostonians won’t spend the rest of their lives locked in their homes, at least not until the next time there’s a terrorist on the loose. But then again neither are Rwandans or Sudanese. This isn’t so much an inspirational message as a pat on the back from a government that once again failed in its duty to keep Americans from being terrorized.

If America had refused to be terrorized, the Tsarnaevs would not have been admitted to this country or would have been shown the door once they started adding terrorist videos to their playlist. Instead Tamerlan Tsarnaev was free to slap around his girlfriend while his brother Dzhokhar was adding classic hits to his YouTube playlist like “We Will Dedicate Our Lives to the Jihad.”

That ditty, from the hit-master behind “Hey, Shahid,” “The Holy Jihad (Rise Muslim)” and “Insallah, We are Waiting for Paradise” contains lyrics like “Paradise’s rivers softly chime/The 72 virgins lovingly whisper” and “Infidels rule the earth/for the faithful life is torture.”

But while infidels might still rule the United States, though there are serious questions to be raised about who is ruling Michigan or New Jersey, life was hardly torture for the Tsarnaevs who drove luxury cars, attended good schools and got good media coverage. The good media coverage continued even after their bout of mass murder as the New York Times feature story on them was headlined, “Far From War-Torn Homeland, Trying to Fit In.” And who can blame them for trying to fit in by practicing some of their native customs of mass murder.

At some point refusing to be terrorized looks a lot like refusing to pay attention to what terrorism is. After September 11 the government encouraged everyone to get back out there and shop. The message now is take in an interfaith service and then visit your local mosque for a sanitized tour that explains how peaceful Islam really is. There’s a lot of talk about finishing the marathon and MoveOn.orging on our way past the unpleasantness.

But there are two standards on being terrorized: When a mentally ill man shoots up a school, then everyone is obligated to be terrorized all the time. Children can be seized for chewing a pop tart the wrong way and the leading leaders tow around selected parents of victims to demand that the pesky Bill of Rights take a back seat to a special moral superiority vote from a former Democratic member of congress whose great achievement in life was getting shot in the head by another mental patient.

The next Adam Lanza is just around the corner. But the next Tamerlan Tsarnaev isn’t worth bothering with. Gun control is an urgent issue, but mass immigration from terrorist countries isn’t.

Talk of refusing to be terrorized smacks of governments handing out coping mechanisms for preventable acts of terror. And once we start going down that road, it’s worth remembering that the timeless coping mechanism for that sort of thing is Stockholm Syndrome. Indeed the old Stockholm cure is popular in the media which is already beginning to disgorge explanations of alienation that will show that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev didn’t kill on their own, we made them killers by not showing them enough love.

It’s not the role of governments to tell people how to get over a terrorist attack. Nor is it the role of government to violate the Bill of Rights using the act of a lone madman as a pretext. But it is the role of government to stop an international campaign of terror by a fanatical ideology from reaching these shores using the blunt tool of immigration.

Refusing to be terrorized is as simple as refusing to accept more immigrants from Muslim countries. It’s not the least repressive measure ever, but it beats interfering with the civil rights of hundreds of millions of Americans who are not members of terrorist groups.

Originally published at the Gatestone Institute.

How can Salam Fayyad’s resignation as Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority be considered a setback for the peace process when he had never been involved in the negotiations with Israel in the first place?

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas never consulted with Fayyad about the peace process with Israel. Over the past five years, the two men hardly even spoken to one other.

After Fayyad’s resignation last Saturday, many Western journalists and political analysts rushed to describe the move as a “major blow to the Middle East peace process and U.S. efforts to revive the stalled peace talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel.”

One headline was: “Salam Fayyad Resigns: Peace Process On Hold.”

A BBC correspondent described Fayyad’s resignation as a “major blow for U.S. efforts to restart the long-stalled peace process with Israel.”

Another British journalist, commenting on the resignation, said: “Mr. Fayyad’s departure is a big blow to the peace process, which ha[d] been given fresh impetus since last month’s visit to the region of Barack Obama.”

But those who are fearful about the future of the peace process clearly do not know what they are talking about.

As prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Fayyad was never involved in any of the peace talks with Israel.

Fayyad himself once explained that ever since the signing of the Oslo Accords about 20 years ago, it was the PLO, and not the Palestinian Authority, that was conducting peace talks with Israel

Moreover, Fayyad was never involved in the Palestinian leadership’s decision-making process regarding the peace process.

The only people Abbas consulted with were PLO and Fatah loyalists. Decisions regarding the peace talks with Israel were always taken either by Abbas alone or in coordination with members of the PLO Executive Committee and the Fatah Central Committee.

Fayyad never belonged to any of these two Palestinian key-decision-making bodies.

The overall policies and strategies of the Palestinian Authority were never part of Fayyad’s responsibility.

Important decisions were always taken only by Abbas and a handful of his trusted aides, who never deemed it necessary to consult with their prime minister.

Even when Fayyad opposed Abbas’s bid for Palestinian statehood at the U.N. General Assembly in November 2012, no one in the Palestinian Authority took his stance seriously.

During the past five years, Abbas and his inner circle succeeded in turning Fayyad into a prime minister whose powers were limited only to economic issues; or as some Palestinians used to say, “Fayyad served more as a mayor than as a prime minister.”

Even if Fayyad had stayed in office, there is no reason to believe that the chances of reviving the peace process would have been better.

How could Fayyad have salvaged the peace process when the decisions were made only by Abbas and his top aides?

Was anyone expecting Fayyad openly to challenge Fatah, the PLO and other Palestinians by returning to the negotiating table on his own?

The Americans and Europeans seem to have forgotten that Fayyad represents a political list that won only two seats in the 2006 parliamentary elections.

Although there are some who praise his efforts to build state institutions and a fine economy, they also seem to be turning a blind eye to Fayyad’s lack of grassroots support among Palestinians.

Fayyad’s departure from the scene will have no impact on the peace process because the decision on this issue was never in his hands.

Besides, Fayyad’s credibility has been severely undermined by U.S. and European efforts to keep him in power against the wishes of Abbas, Fatah and many Palestinians.

The claim that Fayyad’s resignation is a major blow to the peace process is not only untrue, it is ridiculous. Such claims are intended to create the impression, totally false, that were it not for Fayyad’s resignation, the peace process would have been salvaged.

The truth is that Abbas was the one who decided to boycott the peace talks until Israel meets his conditions, including a full cessation of settlement construction and recognition of the pre-1967 lines as the future borders of a Palestinian state.

Abbas has been boycotting not only Israel, but also his prime minister — who finally grew tired of the Palestinian Authority president’s efforts to undermine and discredit him.