Tag: the Middle East

Once again, Rudy Giuliani has demonstrated why his tenure as Mayor of New York these past years marked a transformation of our city. There are those who say that he should have accepted the $10 million for the World Trade Center victims fund from that Saudi prince who accompanied his check with the advice that the United States "should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause. Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of the Israelis while the world turns the other cheek." They said the Mayor should just have issued a disclaimer.

We are dismayed at the carping against Prime Minister Sharon by former Prime Minister Netanyahu about kowtowing to the Bush administration. He should give it a rest.

Sounding a theme recurrent in these pages, Fiamma Nirenstein has penned an article, "How Suicide Bombers Are Made," appearing in the current issue of Commentary magazine, which concludes that the problem with Yasir Arafat and company is not that they can't seem to keep their word or that they disagree with this or that Israel imposition, or indeed that they have a recurrent violent bent. It is that they reflect a fundamental difficulty among Arabs with the notion of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Understandably, Monday's State Department rebuke of Israel over the death of senior Palestinian leader Mustafa Zubari and its policy of restricting the movement of Palestinians generally, has led to sharp statements in the Jewish community. There is a general concern that the United States is wavering in its appreciation of the Sharon government's need to get at those who are directing the terror against its citizens and to impede terrorist infiltration. Yet, while the State Department's statement was not at all welcome, we urge that matters be kept in context.

One reading Deborah Sontag's front-page article in the July 26th issue of The New York Times could well understand the calls one hears lately for Jews to suspend their Times subscriptions over its outrageous coverage of the Middle East. Ms. Sontag's piece is transparent revisionism which well serves the seeming omnipresent effort to shift the blame for the collapse of Camp David from the Palestinians to something systemic to the Middle East conflict. It almost seems that Ms. Sontag and others now hawking the same line are following a scenario scripted by Arafat lieutenants intent on minimizing Israeli concessions at Camp David and thereby set the stage for the next phase of negotiations.

The outrageous refusal of the UN to turn over those videotapes that recorded the terrorist kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers last October puts into sharp focus the bankruptcy of the UN?s mission in the Middle East. The tapes are said to show the faces of the kidnappers and also to contain other important information on the kidnappings. Yet the international peace-keeping organization, after shamefully denying that the tapes existed, incredibly is now balking at turning over the tapes without blocking out the faces of the apparent kidnappers in the interests of neutrality.