What The Middle East Peace Process Needs - Palestinian Settlements

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

What The Middle East Peace Process Needs - Palestinian Settlements

At least that's the interesting idea Dr. Richard Landes at The Augean Stables came up with.

Instead of merely focusing on freezing construction in Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, how about concentrating on getting the Palestinians out of those squalid refugee camps and building settlements for them in the Fatah occupied areas of the West bank?

I’d like to propose something that can test Palestinian intentions in concrete terms that will not only reassure Israelis profoundly, but benefit the Palestinian refugees. To my mind, the greatest sign that the Palestinian Authority had no intention of pursuing Oslo as a way to achieve peace, but as a Trojan Horse, is the fact that, once they had control of significant tracts of land in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, they never made the slightest move to get Palestinian refugees out of the camps and into real housing. The scandal of how the Arab and Palestinian leadership have treated their refugees is the most revealing story in the long and allegedly complex conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis.

I suggest that President Obama demand, publicly, and in the same strong terms with which he addresses the Israelis, that the PA begin immediately building settlements for Palestinian refugees on the lands available to them in the West Bank, so that they can begin living decent lives. This would be an enormous boon to the Palestinian economy, it would mobilize the significant talents the Palestinians have in the building industry, and would signal to the Israelis that the “right of return” — i.e., the demand that Israel commit demographic suicide — is not lurking in the background of the “Arab Peace Plan.”

For reasons I've pointed out before, that's never going to happenespecially not with this president. But it's an intruiging idea nevertheless, and I'd love to see how the Fatah mafia would justify not comply.

Actually, they probably would agree to it. And than steal the funding provided for it, just like they've stolen all the rest.

Your thoughts?

UPDATE: Soccer Dad, one of the ever vigilant members of Joshua's Army points out to me that the Israelis actually tried to build homes for refugees and get them out of the camps. And they got a whole UN Resolution condemning Israel for doing it. 

Obama's Lying Stimulus Math: The Real Numbers

PoliticalMath crunched the numbers on Obama's claim that the stimulus 'saved 150,000 jobs using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I love the 'saving jobs' bit. leave it to Obama's team to come up with a 'statistic' that can't be verified and makes a nifty media soundbite. But the real numbers tell a different story.

Back in February, Obama claimed that if his stimulus bill wasn't passed,(you know, the one nobody in Congress was given a chance to read) we'd lose 13,492,000 jobs and have an unemployment rate of 8.7%. According to the Prevaricator-in-chief said back in February, the stimulus was supposed to save over a million jobs with a loss of only 12,251,000 jobs and a 7.9% unemployment rate.

The real numbers? The latest figures on unemployment puts the total at 14,511,000 jobs lost with the stimulus, and an unemployment rate of 9.4%.And that's likely conservative.

To put it another way as Politicalmath points out in graphic form above, the US actually lost over a million more jobs more with the stimulus than if we had done nothing!

What the president is doing is ignoring the fact that his predictions in the past were horribly inaccurate and simply moving ahead with new predictions. The big difference is that his new predictions can’t be judged against any set of objective reality. He is pitting the actual universe in which the stimulus bill passed against the imaginary universe in which it did not pass. Not surprisingly, the imaginary universe is worse that the real universe and the result is that the President is a hero for saving us from that imaginary universe.

Their predictions were not just kinda wrong. They were horrifically, disastrously wrong. If President Obama is going to use statistics and charts to push nearly $800 billion in spending, I think we should be able to expect his numbers to at least kinda match the reality that comes out of his policies.

At the very least, I’d like to know how his team got those numbers. More importantly, I’d like to know how they have changed their method of prediction.

I think the answer is that the so-called stimulus was never intended to save jobs or fix the economy, but to plunder the nation's wealth for the benefit of his political allies and to bring the American people to a point of desperation so that they will continue to give up more and more of their liberty in exchange for increasingly more meagre government handouts. Thanks to having what amounts to almost a government controlled media, he's gotten away with it so far.

Barack Obama is talking about another stimulus as I write this to pay for his bogus health care scam, and talking about taxing company provided health benefits as income, a European style Value Added national sales tax, a general Federal tax increase or a combination of all three to pay for it all.

We haven't even begun to see the worst of this yet.

Morgan Freeman..."Want To End Racism? Stop Talking About It!"

Morgan Freeman slaps 60 Minute's resident idiot Mike Wallace upside the head...simply superb.

(hat tip, KGS at Tundra Tabloid

Europe's Lurch To The Right And What's Behind it

Europe's electorate has moved solidly to the Right, both in the EU elections to the European parliament and in a number of local elections.

In France, Germany, Italy, and Poland ruling center-right governments got unexpected endorsements from th electorate, while in two socialist ruled countries, Britain and Spain, leftist parties got creamed. So did socialists in Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, and elsewhere.

British PM Gordon Brown is so unpopular that his ministers are jumping off Labour's sinking ship so rapidly it's hard to keep track. Almost everyone concedes that if an election were held today, the Conservatives would win easily and Labour might actually fall to being Britain's third party. The British National Party, well to the right of center did extremely well in Britain's local elections...much better than anyone dreamed.

The parties of Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Sarkozy cleaned up at the polls , and in the Netherlands Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party ended up as the second strongest party in the country behind the ruling Christian Democrats.

After decades of socialist rule, what's behind Europe's right turn?

Aside from simple frustration with the existing order and its encouragement of multiculturalism and unlimited immigration from the Muslim world, the reason can be summed up in one word: Obama.

For years, Europeans had the privilege of living in a bubble. Those primitive, childish Americans spent billions of dollars to protect Europe from the Soviets, allowing Europe the luxury of not having to spend money to provide for its own defense. And the booming American free enterprise economy and favorable trade agreements allowed Europe to build its own economy by selling exports to America, and to fund an outrageous socialist welfare state built on the ponzi scheme of high taxation and the expectation that this pleasant status quo would continue.

Then along came Barack Hussein Obama.

Europeans might have originally loved the idea of someone like Obama to replace that despised cowboy George W. Bush, because just like American voters, they simply didn't know much about Obama. But after six months, they've seen him working hard on wrecking the American economy, tripling our deficit and doubling down with massive spending . Even worse, he wanted the Europeans to embrace the same madness, calling for the EU to initiate 'stimulus packages' with borrowed money, just like the US. They turned him down flat, and a collective shudder ran through Europe when they realized how badly Obama was managing the US economy and what that meant for Europe's prosperity.

Obama's economic policies have shown the Europeans the ugly side of the end result of the socialist nirvana their politicians on the left have been bamboozling them with for decades, and the realization has set in that without the US economy as the driving engine, it's a recipe for ruin.

Obama then increased that angst by sharply cutting America's defense budget, reneging on planned missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic provided for in treaties signed by the Bush Administration, promising a 'reset' with an increasingly aggressive Russia, and talking openly about cutbacks in American forces stationed in Europe.

He then sent things into overdrive with his non-policy on Iran's nuclear weapons ( at precisely the time when Europe was gearing itself up to get a little tougher with the mullahs) , by publicly calling for Turkey's admission into the EU and by his Islamist and pro-sharia rhetoric in places like Cairo.

What Obama's antics have done, along with the financial crisis, is to bring Europeans back to reality as they understand that Obama's America is not going to be there to bail them out of trouble. And that the US is likely to have a huge task just repairing the damage occurring on Obama's watch after he's gone.

It's a strange paradox that the man so many Europeans hailed as a fresh beginning when he got elected has turned into exactly that...in a way many of them never anticipated. And it's equally odd that th eman who campaigned on improving relations with our European allies has ended up doing exactly the opposite.

Sarah Palin Interview On FOX

This one speaks for itself...enjoy.