Charles Krauthammer has written something about the Middle East that is ingenuous enough to merit a response. He wrote “Land Without Peace” in the September 30, 2011 edition of National Review Online. The piece also carries the subtitle: “Why Abbas went to the U.N.” It is not ingenuous in the sense that it is free of deception – it is full of that; after all the man is a trained psychiatrist. Rather, it is ingenuous in the sense that he tries to engage in a conversation that has the potential to shed much needed light on the subject he tackles and those he never intended to.
To make his points, Krauthammer draws not only on his background as a former psychiatrist but also a phenomenon that started to creep into North American journalism a few decades ago, and is now manifesting itself forcefully both in the liberal and conservative media. I call it the Judeo-Yiddish form of journalism which consists of the practitioners taking as client a cause that is close to their hearts, an individual they sympathize with or a political entity they feel obliged to lobby for or feel compelled to do so. And they plead these cases as would do a lawyer in a courtroom with the exception that in this instance, the judge remains silent because the role is played by a largely muted audience. Unlike a real judge, however, the audience cannot bang on the bench with a gavel or throw the misbehaving lawyer or prosecutor out of the courtroom. In fact, most of the time, the journalists themselves play the role of the real judge, jury, lawyer, prosecutor, ordinary witnesses and expert ones, all rolled into one. And this happens while the audience can only read the printed media and watch the audio-visuals, and do no more to respond than fire off an angry email at the misbehaving publication or network. As to what happens to these emails; well, their content is usually ignored but their existence is eagerly added to the statistics and used as proof that the audience is engaged, a fact that results in a higher rating for the publisher and higher advertising revenues.
You can get a sense of the baroque-like exaggeration that this style of journalism has reached when you spend time watching the Fox News Channel. You will find that from the moment the broadcast begins at six o'clock in the morning to the last show that runs well into the night, the network broadcasts almost nothing but the wall to wall promotion of its friends and the wall to wall prosecution of its enemies. With very few exceptions, you see show after show after show being hosted by anchor after anchor after anchor who do nothing that is not the trashing of one or the promotion of the other. Calling themselves conservative, the Fox News group have their nemesis at the CNN Channel where the group there sees itself occupy the liberal end of the spectrum. This group is more subtle than Fox therefore less openly baroque but it has the predilection to exaggerate on occasions depending on the issues being handled.
It would be useful at this point to take two examples that illustrate the sort of journalism which comes out of this cauldron of modern media. The first is that of Megyn Kelly (a catholic) who anchors an afternoon show on Fox News. She was trained as a lawyer but never had a distinguished career in the field. She became a journalist instead where she now treats each case as would do a prosecutor in a courtroom but where she does not have to worry about a defense lawyer that may object to her presentation or a judge that can overrule her or a witness that would contradict her thesis or a jury that can get tired of her antics. In fact, she plays all these characters herself and not only that; she does all this and more like they say it in the lingo of journalism.
The second example is that of Tom Friedman (a Jew) who is a columnist with the New York Times. This man frequently appears as guest on one of the television shows where he inadvertently exemplifies the sorry state of modern journalism by his antics; and he does it without realizing what evidence he leaves behind by which future historians will judge our era. One of the most comical and most revealing moments came when he created a skit in which he played the role of a lawyer trying to reform and redeem a young criminal. The dialogue between the two went something like this: “Let me be your lawyer,” says Friedman and the imaginary criminal (also played by Friedman) responds: “No, no I want to go on committing crimes.” And he repeats the give-and-take several times. You ought to see this skit; it is hilarious.
This is the background about which Charles Krauthammer is operating. When you add to it the skills he brings to the field as manipulator of the psyche, you understand what he is able to achieve and why. Look what he does right at the beginning of his piece. He calls an inversion of the truth what he says is the accepted narrative because according to him, the narrative says this: “Middle East peace is made impossible by a hard-line … Israel that … continues to build settlements.” In fact, the rest of the article is a litany of instances where he states that Israel repeatedly offered peace but that the Palestinians rejected each and every offer. So you look at these instances closely and you see that the writer did not have to show where the inversion has occurred in any of them. Why so? Because he deceptively discusses an inversion that may have happened to a case that stands outside of those instances and that is of no consequence to them. But then the author confuses between all the instances and makes it sound like the inversion has occurred everywhere.
To see the reach of this piece of work, look again at the part of the quote I presented like this: “a hard-line … Israel that refuses...” The territorial dispute being between Palestine and Israel, this presentation conveys the situation on the ground accurately. Thus, if there has been an inversion of the truth -- as it is alleged there was one -- it would be one that concerns the Palestine-Israel relationship. But the fact is that it is impossible to prove there was an inversion here because there was none; not even a hint of one. However, there may have been a situation somewhere else where an inversion of the truth could be fabricated with some ease. This is in the relationship that exists between the Likud Party and its detractors. And so, to confuse the two situations, Krauthammer wrote that part of the quote this way: “a hard-line Likud-led Israel that refuses...” By inserting “Likud-led” in the phrase, he was able to attribute the inversion that may exist or that can be fabricated between the Likud and its detractors, to the Palestine-Israel relationship. In the end, it is this false claim that sticks in the mind of the readers, a confusion skilfully engineered by a psycho-journalist lawyering for Israel.
And now that he has accomplished this feat, guess what else he does. What he does is so daring it is hard to believe that someone can have this much moxie. But let me say it anyway; this man took the findings that were arrived at over time by websites such as this one, and he attributed them to the wrong party. What he did is the very inversion he complained about a moment ago. The main finding being that Israel never wanted to sign a definitive peace treaty with the Palestinians because it would freeze its borders and prevent it from expanding anymore, Krauthammer turned the truth on its head. Since the Arabs as a group offered to recognize Israel and to establish normal relations with it a decade or so ago, Israel chose to remain in a state of war with most of them so that it can continue to expand the settlements in the West Bank. It has been doing this by pushing their capacity from 200,000 settlers at the time to about triple that now.
And yet, you catch the author of the article say that the Palestinians are rejecting peace because they want more land. What land? you scream. Israel has the guns and it is stealing more land every day while the Palestinians have only their bare hands to defend themselves, and they are losing land with every brick that is used to construct a new Jewish settlements. The Jews are advancing eastward as they steal acre after acre while no Palestinian has ever taken as much as a square inch west of the 1967 borders. But as you can see, my dear reader, the current state of journalism in North America allows the practitioners to invert the truth while accusing others of committing a “gross” inversion of the truth. And so you ask: How much more grotesque can it get? Even the Baroque Century never witnessed anything as deformed or mutilated as this.
The thing that stands out, however, is that even when someone is talented as much as Krauthammer is, he still cannot deceive the readers for too long without showing his hand somewhere along the line. It happened here as he listed a litany of instances where the peace talks failed and he blamed the failures on the Palestinians without giving detail. He took this approach to hide the truth but the truth came out elsewhere in the article anyway. Look what happened. To defend Netanyahu and his Likud-led coalition, he says that the Prime Minister created “Israel's first national consensus for a two state solution.” This means that for at least four decades before that, there was not the intention to have a two-state solution. Thus, the staging of the peace talks during that period was nothing more than an Israeli sham, a pretense under which to hide while violating the UN resolutions concerning the 1967 borders; under which to hide while violating the Geneva Convention concerning the obligations of the occupying power – all carried out with the encouragement and the protection of America.
This meant that the Israeli army and the settlers were given the green light to chase away the Palestinians, confiscate their land while Krauthammer and his likes griped about things like this: “Abbas unwaveringly insists on the so-called 'right of return' which would demographically destroy Israel by swamping it with millions of Arabs...” Arabs? Did he say Arabs? These are not any Arabs, they are the millions of Palestinians that Israel ethnically cleansed off their land in the first place and continues to do so even now. And this man says that unless Abbas stops talking about the “so-called” right of return, he remains perfectly consistent with Palestinian rejectionism. Thus, what the psychiatrist is demanding is that Abbas renounce the right of the Palestinians to have their lost properties returned to them or be compensated for them. If Abbas does not do this, says Krauthammer, he proves that he is a rejectionist. Well, my friend, only a Jew can talk like this and still maintain a straight face.
But this is not all; there is another Jewel buried in the article that reveals so much more about what goes on inside the head of a straight-faced Jewish blabbermouth. It is that when these people say “the destruction of Israel,” they don't have visions of a new holocaust -- which is what they want you to believe will happen -- it is that they fear having an “Arab” as neighbor. This would be their new holocaust but it is something we all have to live with since there will always be a Krauthammer-like character living in the neighborhood. Get used to it, my friend, because the world is becoming more crowded by the day, and while some people consider having an undesirable neighbor a cross to bear, others consider it a holocaust to bellyache about. Stop the bellyaching; it bores us to death.
Having already admitted that: “Israel's first national consensus for a two state solution” was not achieved until a few months ago at the hands of a Likud prime minister, Charles Krauthammer goes on to list the three instances where he says the Palestinians rejected the offers that were made to them. He lists one that was made at Camp David in 2000, one that was made at Taba in 2001 and one that was announced in Israel in 2008. He does not admit they were sham offers since there was not yet the intent to have a two-state solution, and he does not give detail as to why the talks broke down. But he asks: “Did Abbas accept?” And he answers his own question like this: “Of course not. If he had, the conflict would be over and Palestine would already be a member of the United Nations.”
But why did Abbas not accept? you ask. The answer to this question can be found in the truth that was buried with the details Krauthammer avoided discussing. You get a hint what these details may be when you see that the three instances were offers that were dictated by one side and not accords that were reached by both sides. The truth is that each offer contained a poison pill that no sane person would swallow. One such example comes at the end of the article itself. Here it is: “Israel has offered … land for peace three times … and been refused every time. Why? For … the same reason Abbas went to the UN … to get … sovereignty with no reciprocal recognition of a Jewish state.” This was one poison pill. The subject of recognizing a Jewish state is one that merits a separate discussion; suffice it to say for now that this condition came as a surprise and a dictate after the two sides had agreed to a deal they could sign. In fact, popping a surprise at the last minute has always been the poison pill that the Israeli negotiators injected at the end of each discussion thus causing the Palestinians to tell them to shove it. It happened when the Israelis injected the question of creating a Jewish enclave in Arab Hebron, the question of having a disarmed Palestinian state, the question of stationing Israeli troops along the periphery of Palestine and so on and so forth – all of which came after a deal had been negotiated and was ready for signature. Thus, the truth is that Abbas accepted the peace deals that were negotiated but he rejected the poison that was added afterward.
While it can be demonstrated precisely that the Palestinians rejected the Israeli dictates because of the poison that was injected in each of them and while it can be demonstrated that they would sign a negotiated agreement that remains free of poison till it is signed, Krauthammer concludes his presentation by offering an imprecise and amorphous reason to explain what motivated the Palestinians to go to the UN at this time. He says this: “The Palestinians are quite prepared to sign … anything but a final peace. Anything but a treaty that ends the conflict once and for all – while leaving a Jewish state still standing.” But he has nothing in the article that would support this conclusion. What he did may be smart lobbying but it is shoddy journalism.
He then tells us what the Israelis want. He says this: “Territorial disputes are solvable; existential conflicts are not ... Land for peace, yes. Land without peace is nothing but an invitation to suicide.” Thus, with a series of slogans packaged in the style of the bumper stickers, he retells the story of the rabbis who looked for and found passages in the Old Testament which say there is a place in Palestine for only one people. Either the Palestinians accept the Jewish poison pill and disappear or the Jews will be the ones to disappear, he asserts. But since the Jews have no intention of committing suicide, says Krauthammer, Abbas must be the good boy who will cooperate to cleanse his own people out of Palestine.
There is so much fear, schizophrenia and paranoia here, you cannot help but think there is one shrink that needs to have his head examined.