Saturday, August 03, 2002

Horowitz blathers on about IvP, as per usual, but I loved this one line:

"the West Bank must be occupied by military force, disarmed and denazified".

I'm amazed his gun-loving friends on the right haven't explained to him the contradiction between the latter two concepts. Besides that, however, what the hell does "denazification" mean, exactly? I'm aware of the efforts made to erase nazi propaganda from Germany after the war, and I'm also quite aware that it didn't quite work- that it was more the country coming to its senses than any "process". It certainly didn't quite work out the way it was supposed to in Japan, whose culture is hardly cleansed of nationalism and (sadly) xenophobia, and whose pacificism probably has less to do with anything MacArthur did and more to do with the immense psychological impact of the Big Freaking Bombs that were dropped on two of their cities? And for that matter, what the hell does either have to do with Palestine, except the enduring American propensity to think of every conflict in terms of WWII?

David's simplistic arguments don't stop there. What's up with him saying "The solution to the Mid-East tragedy is to turn the Arab-occupied West Bank over to Jordan and make it politically part of the Jordanian state?" If this were even remotely possible, wouldn't somebody have done it by now? Do the Jordanians get a say in this, and in the inevitable hostile reaction of the other Arab states in the region? Can the Jordanians give this region autonomy, and if they do so, what happens if the newly autonomous group of "Jordanians" decide to call themselves "Palestinians" and fight to get their land back from the Israelis (discarding, for the moment, the question of whether they're justified in this belief or not)? Will the Jordanian government be made responsible? Will the United States then call Jordan a "terrorist state" and invade it and replace the friendly regime with, um, a friendly regime? Will Israel attack Jordan, and annex some of the territory to ensure their security against the newly-hostile Jordanians?

Did Horowitz actually bother thinking before he wrote this, or is he content with the idea that any intelligent readers are going to consider him a clueless boob advocating useless "solutions"?

More disturbing than that, however, is the boundless confidence that David seems to have in the ability of the American government to re-educate and re-civilize Palestinian youth. I doubt he'd argue that the U.S. government does a good job of that now with its own children, and yet it's supposed to somehow brainwash Palestinian children into loving those that, in the scenario that David advocates, basically hold them and their parents hostage? Is this supposed to be some sort of induced Stockholm effect?

Well, no, of course not. It's nothing of the sort. It's just David, with his mouth writing sheet after sheet of checks that his ass can't cash. Horowitzwatch barely needs to exist when such blather continues to obviously negate itself. Who needs an offensive when the target is so busily shooting himself in the head?

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