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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Melanie Phillips</title>
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		<title>Welcome to Obamastan</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/melanie-phillips/welcome-to-obamastan/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=welcome-to-obamastan</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2013 04:44:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Melanie Phillips]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chris Stevens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hearing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=189204</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A world in which America no longer protects human freedom and Islamist tyrants rule. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Benghazi-attack.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-189242" alt="Benghazi-attack" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Benghazi-attack-450x337.png" width="270" height="202" /></a>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.melaniephillips.com/obamastan">MelaniePhillips.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Fort Hood, Benghazi, the Boston bombings, Iran/Syria, Israel. The pattern is unmistakeable; the danger to America is exponentially increasing; the scandal is deepening into something nearer to a national crisis.</p>
<p>The Obama administration is playing down the Islamist threat to the US and the free world, empowering Islamists at home and abroad, endangering America and betraying its allies &#8212; and covering up its egregious failure to protect the homeland as a result of all the above, while instead blaming America for its own victimisation.</p>
<p>What is coming out in the Benghazi hearings would be jaw-dropping if it had not been apparent from the get-go that the administration failed to protect its own people in the beseiged American mission where Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff were murdered in 2012, then lied about the fact that this was an Islamist attack, and then covered up both its failure and its lie. (Apparent, that is, to some &#8212; but not to the American media, most of which gave the Obama administration a free pass on the scandal in order to ensure the smooth re-election of The One).</p>
<p>But the administration has form on this &#8212; serious, continuing form. After the Fort Hood massacre in 2009, in which an Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas shouting ‘Allahu akhbar’, not only was it revealed that his radicalisation and extremist links had been ignored but the Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies classified the shootings merely as an act of ‘workplace violence’.</p>
<p>Weeks after the Boston marathon terrorist atrocity, there is still no explanation of why the FBI did not act against the Tsarnaev brothers, despite having had one of them on their books as a dangerous Islamic radical after a warning from Russian intelligence; and why, as the House Homeland Security Committee <a href="http://homeland.house.gov/press-release/hearing-confirms-information-not-shared-boston-police-prior-marathon-bombings">heard yesterday</a>, the FBI didn’t pass on their suspicions about the brothers to the Boston police.</p>
<p>Even now, the US authorities are playing down or even dismissing  Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s extremist Islamic views. Whether or not the brothers had links to foreign extremists is still unclear. But what is bizarre is the authorities’ belief that if they did not have any such links, they cannot have had any religious motive.</p>
<p>Despite evidence such as Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s outbursts at a Boston mosque, where he denounced clerics&#8217; references to Thanksgiving and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as ‘contrary to Islam’, the brothers were described by Philip Mudd, the former Deputy Director of National Security at the FBI and the former Deputy Director of the Counterterrorist Centre for the CIA, as merely ‘angry kids’. Mudd <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-25/charlie-rose-talks-to-philip-mudd">told Charlie Rose</a>:</p>
<p>‘They may be disenfranchised. They may have had a bad experience at school. They may not have friends, and they say, “Look, we want to do something.” This tactic of terrorism is a tactic of the 21st century.<b> </b>I don’t necessarily think these are real jihadi terrorists. I think they’re angry kids.’</p>
<p>You really do have to pinch yourself. How in heaven’s name can a guy like Mudd, with his background in so-called intelligence, possibly come up with anything quite so stupendously shallow? It is precisely such angry, isolated, disturbed kids who are vulnerable to Islamist preachers who target, groom and manipulate them &#8212; whether in person or through the internet &#8212; to believe that ‘Islam is the answer’ and that they are its soldiers engaged in holy war against the unbelievers.</p>
<p>The wilful and perverse refusal to acknowledge the religious nature of this holy war &#8212; and worse, to lay the blame for such terrorism on the the society that is its victim &#8212; is what lies behind the Benghazi scandal.</p>
<p>The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings this week produced testimony from Gregory Hicks, the former deputy to the murdered Ambassador Stevens, that was simply devastating for the Obama administration and its former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton &#8212; who infamously erupted, under questioning last January about the nature of the attack,</p>
<p>‘What difference, at this point, does it make?’</p>
<p>Well, Mr Hicks has started to provide the answer. Despite repeated calls for more security to combat the clear threat of jihadi attack on the US mission, Mrs Clinton’s State Department had farmed out its security to none other than a jihadist group. When the fatal attack started, Mr Hicks vainly appealed for fighter jets to buzz the besieged compound. As<a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/article3759503.ece"> the Times (£)</a> reported:</p>
<p>‘When a team of four special forces troops were about to leave Tripoli, at Mr Hicks&#8217;s request, their leader had to stand them down because he was not cleared by senior military chiefs to travel. Mr Hicks said the furious officer told him: “This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has shown more balls than someone in the military.”’</p>
<p>Disingenuously, the Pentagon says in response that no forces could have arrived in time to mount a rescue. But there was more lethal testimony from Mr Hicks.</p>
<p>After the attack, the Obama administration claimed that it had resulted from a protest that had got out of hand over an anti-islam YouTube video. But Mr Hicks testified that it was known from the start that it was a jihadi attack which had nothing to do with that video. The <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324244304578471361393154072.html">Wall Street Journal reported</a>:</p>
<p>‘Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission at the embassy in Tripoli, recalled his last conversation with Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who told him, &#8220;Greg, we&#8217;re under attack.&#8221; Mr. Hicks said he knew then that Islamists were behind the assault. In other words, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice&#8217;s public claim at the time that an anti-Islam YouTube video spurred the assault was known inside the government to be false when she and White House spokesman Jay Carney said it.</p>
<p>‘Mr. Hicks said he briefed Mrs. Clinton that night, yet the father of victim Tyrone Woods says she later told him that the YouTube video maker would be “prosecuted and arrested” as if he were responsible for Benghazi. Stranger still, Mr. Hicks says Mrs. Clinton&#8217;s then chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, ordered him not to give solo interviews about the attack to a visiting Congressional delegation.’</p>
<p>Mr Hicks further claims that he was instructed by officials not to talk to congressional investigators, and then demoted after he asked why senior Clinton aides had blamed the attack on a video protest. Again, officials have denied his claim of demotion. But the cat is now out of the bag. The Times (£) <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/article3759503.ece">reports</a> that an e-mail has surfaced  revealing that senior State Department figures — including Ms Clinton — knew within 24 hours that the group responsible for the Benghazi attack was linked to Islamic terrorists.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, from the beginning of this affair there have also been persistent questions about quite what the US mission was actually doing in Benghazi. Now the Washington Times has <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/8/inside-the-ring-china-reins-in-north-korea/#ixzz2Spo2f3rx">reported this</a>:</p>
<p><b>‘</b>A U.S. intelligence official tells Inside the Ring that the hearing and congressional inquiries have failed to delve into what the official said is another major scandal: CIA covert arms shipments to Syrian rebels through Benghazi.</p>
<p>‘Separately, a second intelligence source said CIA operations in Libya were based on a presidential finding signed in March 2011 outlining covert support to the Libyans. This source said there were signs that some of the arms used in the Benghazi attack — assault rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades — ended up in the hands of the terrorists who carried out the Benghazi attack as a result of the CIA operation in Libya.</p>
<p>‘The unanswered questions — that appear unasked by most congressional investigators — include whether the CIA facility in Benghazi near the diplomatic compound and the contingent of agency officers working there played a role in the covert transfer through Turkey of captured Libyan weapons or personnel to rebels fighting the Bashar Assad regime in Syria.</p>
<p>‘“There was a ship that transported something to Turkey around the time Ambassador Chris Stevens met with a Turkish diplomat within hours of his murder,” the official said. “Was the president&#8217;s overt or covert policy to arm Syrian rebels?”’</p>
<p>Was it indeed. If it was, then Benghazi might turn out to be yet another and particularly terrible example of the damage Obama has wrought upon the security of America and the free world.</p>
<p>This is a President who, by persisting with the charade of negotiation with Iran over its race to manufacture its nuclear bomb, has allowed it to become the dominant power in the region.</p>
<p>That is why Iran’s puppet Assad, who has just accrued hundreds of Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists to help him win his bloody civil war, has been able to slaughter more than 80,000 Syrians and use chemical weapons against them &#8212; while Obama himself may have ineptly armed al Qaeda inside Syria. For the Washington Times<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/8/inside-the-ring-china-reins-in-north-korea/#ixzz2Spp27RpJ"> report</a> goes on:</p>
<p><b>‘</b>The official said congressional investigators need to ask whether the president indirectly or directly helped bolster al Qaeda-linked terrorists in the Jabhat al-Nusrah front rebel group in Syria and whether the CIA ran guns and other weapons captured in Libya to the organization.</p>
<p>‘“Every troubling Middle East-Southwest Asia country — Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and now maybe Syria — where the Obama administration made a significant policy push has gone over to Islamists that are now much more hostile to the United States,” the official said.’</p>
<p>Precisely.</p>
<p>The Benghazi attack was not just appalling in itself; nor was there merely almost certainly a catastrophic failure by the Obama administration to protect its people, and then a mighty cover-up of that failure. Benghazi also serves as a symbol of America’s tragic abandonment, under the Obama administration, of its historic mission to protect life and liberty both in its own homeland and in the free world.</p>
<p>Welcome to Obamastan.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Fanaticism, Mass Murder and the Left</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/melanie-phillips/fanaticism-mass-murder-and-the-left/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fanaticism-mass-murder-and-the-left</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/melanie-phillips/fanaticism-mass-murder-and-the-left/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Aug 2011 04:03:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Melanie Phillips]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=100336</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Diagnosing the modern secular Inquisition.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/And5.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-100344" title="And5" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/And5.jpg" alt="" width="460" height="276" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://melaniephillips.com/home">melaniephillips.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p>In the wake of the Norway atrocity and the reaction it has generated, I have been thinking some more about hatred, fanaticism and moral confusion.</p>
<p>This shouldn’t need saying, but it does: there can be no excuse, justification or rationale whatsoever for the atrocity perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik. The reason it unfortunately needs saying is that I have been reading too many weaselly equivocations about this, along the lines:</p>
<blockquote><p>‘Yes, it was indeed a most terrible atrocity and one’s heart bleeds for those poor victims; <em>but</em> Norway’s politics towards Israel do stink/Norway’s Labour Party stinks/Quisling’s country, say no more/the Islamisation of Europe stinks/it was only a matter of time before someone was provoked by the railroading of public opinion into doing something like this’.</p></blockquote>
<p>No, no, <em>no</em>! Any variety of such ‘yes-buttery’ inescapably makes some kind of excuse for the atrocity, however dressed up it may be in suitably pious expressions of horror. There is never <em>any</em> justification for mass murder. None. Any concerns about the Norwegian ambassador to Israel’s <a href="http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/07/26/3088704/envoy-compares-terror-in-israel-norway">disgusting comments </a>or European Islamisation or anything else are a totally separate matter and must be addressed through the democratic process of argument, persuasion and public debate.</p>
<p>Not only can mass murder never be excused, but the notion that ‘it was only a matter of time before someone was provoked into doing something like this’ is itself as nonsensical as it is obscene. Yes, there are a lot of people in Europe who are angry &#8212; very angry indeed &#8212; about a whole host of things. Some of them are decent people who are boiling with rage at being disenfranchised by an entire political class which seems determined to destroy their civilisation. Some of them have deeply unpleasant or racist views about some of their fellow human beings. Some of them are so angry they may join political groupings which resort on occasion to thuggery and hooliganism (the BNP, EDL or the anti-globalisation riots all come to mind). But violent as some of their behaviour may be, they would not travel to a youth camp, invite the teenagers to gather round and then open fire on them all with dum-dum bullets.</p>
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		<title>Israel: Losing the Battle of Psychological Warfare</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/melanie-phillips/israel-losing-the-battle-of-psychological-warfare/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=israel-losing-the-battle-of-psychological-warfare</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Jan 2011 04:33:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Melanie Phillips]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=81153</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How a strategy of resistance can help break through the wall of lies against the Jewish State.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Anti-Semitism.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-81155" title="Anti-Semitism" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Anti-Semitism.jpg" alt="" width="350" height="294" /></a></p>
<p><strong>[Below is Melanie Phillips' address to the Ariel Conference on Law and Mass Media on December 30, 2010.]</strong></p>
<p>As we all know by now, Israel has lost the battle for public opinion  in the West. Even the Israel government is now acknowledging this fact.  Israel and its defenders have been outclassed and outmaneuvered in a  war of the mind being waged on a battleground it never even acknowledged  it was on.</p>
<p>Calls for more and better hasbara, however, are meaningless if the  message or narrative promoted by Israel and its defenders misses the  point of the attack being waged upon it. And it does miss that point, by  a mile.</p>
<p>You cannot resist or overcome a threat unless you first understand its nature.</p>
<p>The first thing to say is that this phenomenon is characteristic not  just of the media animosity or economic or academic boycotts. It goes  across the intelligentsia and political class, spreading well beyond the  normal suspects on the left into the mainstream middle-classes.</p>
<p>In Britain, the universities, the established church, the theatrical  and publishing worlds, the voluntary sector, significant elements  within the Foreign Office, members of Parliament across the political  spectrum, as well as the media have overwhelmingly signed up to the demonetization and legitimization of Israel.</p>
<p>The scale of this phenomenon is nothing short of a multi-layered civilizational crisis.</p>
<p>The West is experiencing a total inversion of truth evidence and  reason. A society&#8217;s thinking class has overwhelmingly subscribed to an  immoral, patently false and in many cases demonstrably absurd account  of the Middle East, past and present, which it has uncritically absorbed  and assumes to be true.</p>
<p>In routine, everyday discourse history is turned on its head; logic  is suspended; and an entirely false narrative of the conflict is now  widely accepted as unchallengeable fact, from which fundamental error  has been spun a global web of potentially catastrophic false  conclusions.</p>
<p>This has led to a kind of dialogue of the demented in which rational  discussion is simply not possible because there is no shared  understanding of the meaning of language. So victim and victimizer,  truth and lies, justice and injustice turn into their precise opposite.</p>
<p>This madness is being promulgated through a global alliance between  state and non-state actors and diplomats and journalists, politicians  and NGOs and websites. Many of these are waging war not just against  Israel but against the West.</p>
<p>There are two preconditions for an effective fightback.  First is to  form effective structures of resistance. Those structures, however,  depend in turn on a correct understanding of the nature and scale of  what we are up against.</p>
<p>So far, the structures are not in place, and more important still,  what Israel is up against is grossly — and fatally — underestimated and  misunderstood.</p>
<p>The problem is that we are dealing with a pathology — to which we nevertheless respond as if it were rational behaviour.</p>
<p>What happened is a pattern of thinking in the West which turns  reality upside down. Remarkably, this in turn echoes a very similar  inversion of reality within the Islamic world, where such inversion has a  theological base.</p>
<p>Because Islam is considered perfect, its adherents can never do  wrong. All their aggression is therefore represented as self-defense,  while western/Israeli self-defense is said to be aggression.</p>
<p>So in this Orwellian universe the enslavement of Muslim women is  said to represent their liberation; democracy is a means of enslavement  from which the West must be freed; and the murder of Israelis is the  purest form of justice.</p>
<p>Furthermore, this is overlaid by the phenomenon of psychological  projection in which the Islamic world not only denies its own  misdeeds but ascribes them instead to its victims.</p>
<p>So while Muslims deny the Holocaust, they claim that Israel is  carrying out a holocaust in Gaza. Antisemitism is central to Jewish  experience in Europe; Muslims claim that &#8220;Islamophobia&#8221; is rife  throughout Europe.</p>
<p>Israel gives all Jews the &#8220;right of return&#8221; to Israel on account  of the unique reality of global Jewish persecution; the Muslims claim a  &#8220;right of return&#8221; not to their own putative state of Palestine,  but to Israel. They even claim that the Palestinians are the world&#8217;s &#8220;new Jews&#8221;.</p>
<p>These and many other examples are used within the Islamic world to  negate Jewish experience and appropriate it for itself to obtain what  Muslims want in terms of status, power and conquest.</p>
<p>What is remarkable is that instead of treating this as a  pathological deformity of thinking, the western progressive  intelligentsia has largely embraced it as rational and true. And to a  large extent this is because that same western intelligentsia has itself  supplanted rationality by ideology or the dogma of a particular  idea.</p>
<p>Objectivity, evidence and truth have been ditched for ideologies  such as moral and cultural relativism, multiculturalism, feminism,  environmentalism, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, transnationalism,  anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism.</p>
<p>Across a wide range of such issues, it&#8217;s no longer possible to  have a rational discussion with the progressive intelligentsia, as on  each issue there&#8217;s only one story for them which brooks no dissent.</p>
<p>This is because, rather than arriving at a conclusion from the  evidence, ideology inescapably wrenches the evidence to fit a prior  idea. So ideology of any kind is fundamentally anti-reason and truth.  And if there&#8217;s no truth, there can be no lies either; truth and lies  become merely &#8220;alternative narratives&#8221;.</p>
<p>Moral and cultural relativism holds the belief that subjective  experience trumps moral authority and any notion of objectivity or truth has turned right and wrong on their heads.</p>
<p>Because of the dominant belief in multiculturalism, victim culture  and minority rights, self-designated victim groups — those without power  — can never do wrong while majority groups can never do right. And Jews  are not considered a minority because in the hateful discourse of  today&#8217;s culture, Jews are held to be all-powerful as they &#8220;control&#8221; the  media, Wall Street and America.</p>
<p>So the Muslim world cannot be held responsible for blowing people up  as they are the third world victims of the West; so any atrocities they  commit must be the fault of their victims; and so the US had it coming  to it on 9/11. And in similar fashion, Israel can never be the victim of  the Arab world; the murder of Israelis by the Arab world must be  Israel&#8217;s own fault.</p>
<p>So the way has been opened for mass credulity towards propaganda and  fabrication. The custodians of reason have thus turned into destroyers  of reason, centered in the crucible of reason, the university.</p>
<p>All these different ideologies are utopian; in their different ways,  they all posit the creation of the perfect society. That is why they  are considered &#8220;progressive,&#8221; and people on the progressive wing of  politics sign up to them. That helps explain the distressing fact that  so many Jews on the left also sign up to Israel-hatred, since they too  sign up to such utopian ideologies.</p>
<p>But when utopias fail, as they always do, their adherents invariably  select scapegoats on whom they turn to express their rage over the  thwarting of the establishment of that perfect society. And since utopia  is all about realizing the perfect society, these scapegoats become  enemies of humanity.</p>
<p>For Greens, such enemies of humanity are capitalists; for anti-imperialists, America; for militant atheists, religious believers.  Anti-Zionists turn on Israel for thwarting the end to the &#8220;Jewish  question&#8221;: the redemption of western guilt for the persecution of the  Jews — a guilt which can never be redeemed as long as the wretched Jews  continue to make themselves the targets of attack.</p>
<p>In short, therefore, the West cannot defend itself against the  Islamic jihad because it can&#8217;t itself even think straight any more.</p>
<p>But this lethal muddle in the minds of the intelligentsia must be viewed  in turn in the context of a global diplomatic process which itself  embodies upside-down thinking, which fans the flames of bigotry and  defeatism and in which Israel itself has been tragically, and  suicidally, complicit.</p>
<p>It cannot be stressed enough that the reason why those promoting  genocidal bigotry are winning is that the western world has not sought  to defeat them but instead has appeased them from the very start.</p>
<p>In Palestine under the British Mandate, when the Arabs used  terrorist violence to frustrate the will of the League of Nations in  restoring the Jewish home, Britain rewarded them by offering them part  of the Jews&#8217; legal and moral entitlement. When the Arabs started  hijacking planes, the West&#8217;s response was to invite them to the UN to  plead their cause.</p>
<p>And despite the Arabs&#8217; repeated refusal to accept the two state  solution, offered in the 1930s, in 2000 and under Ehud Olmert, and their  current refusal to negotiate at all, America punishes Israel for not  making enough concessions to them  — while giving a free pass to those  who still refuse to accept Israel&#8217;s right to exist.</p>
<p>It is astonishing that the West expects Israel to make any  concessions to such attackers at all. After all, forcing a country which  has endured more than six decades of existential siege to give any  ground to its attackers amounts to forcing such a victim to surrender.  This is expected by the civilized world of no other country.</p>
<p>Yet we are repeatedly told even by certain supporters of Israel that  the Palestinians have a right to a state. Why? In any other conflict,  such aggression forfeits any rights at all.</p>
<p>I am not saying that Israel should retain all the disputed  territories; it may well be in its own interests to give some of them  up. But the point is that Israel has made all the concessions over the  years while the Arabs have made none, yet it is Israel, not the  Arabs, that is under pressure from the West.</p>
<p>This is diplomacy as scripted by Franz Kafka.</p>
<p>The single greatest reason for the endless continuation of the  Middle East impasse is that Britain, Europe and America have  continuously rewarded the aggressor and either attacked the victim or  left it twisting in the wind.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s what needs to be said by Israel and its defenders. But  Israel and its defenders themselves have been crippled or cowed by the  false analysis of the enemy&#8217;s narrative.</p>
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