Transform Hamas into Moderate Organization
Mockery of Serious Thinking
By Con George-Kotzabasis
A short reply to:
Hamas vs. the Fundamentalists
By Amjad Atallah TheWashington Note,
August 17, 2009
Atallah in a post to the Washington Note, on January 20, 2009, displayed his inimitable originality as a political thinker when he claimed that the “cease-fire” in Gaza was Obama’s “first foreign policy success.” On August 17, 2009, from among the ashes of his by now burnt out originality he rises like a phoenix to claim that Hamas is showing the first symptoms of a unique metastasis from a virulent fanatic radical organization to a moderate one. The demiurge of this beatific poetically transcendental transformation from the ugly reality of Hamas as an irreconcilable terrorist organization is Hamas itself. By fighting the extremist pro-Al Qaeda Salafist group of Jund Ansar Allah and killing its leader Abdul Latif Musa, on August 14, 2009, Hamas is blazing a new course of political moderation that according to Atallah would be foolish for the US under Obama not to take advantage of that could change the whole configuration of the Palestine Israel conflict.
Thus the offspring of the Islamist fanatical coupling of Ahmed Yassin and Sayyid Qutb, the founder and the spiritual leader of Hamas respectively who both have their roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, like a poisonous snake is shedding its skin and metamorphosing itself into an amiable friendly python.
Atallah is either unaware of the historical fact or deliberately hides it so he can make his case, that throughout history all widespread and toxic fanatical movements had variable degrees of fanaticism among their members and often created within the general movement their own groups that fought each other to the death. The virulence of fanatical Islam in our times and the internecine and fratricidal warfare that goes and will go within it illustrates in a pellucid manner the above historic fact.
In this context, the attempt of Atallah to transform Hamas into a moderate organization that President Obama could deal with diplomatically and persuade its leadership to stop permanently its deadly attacks on Israel and accept the two-state solution by recognizing Israel is a mockery of serious thinking.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Reply to Two ‘Strategists’ of the Washington Note on the
Resolution of the Palestinian Israel Conflict
By Con George-Kotzabasis
My dear Steve,
You seem to be afflicted with an incurable cancerous growth in your continued rambling ‘cogitations’ of equating “the recklessness, immaturity and sheer stupidity of leadership on of all sides.” To perceive a political equivalence between a fanatic religiously motivated Palestinian leadership and a rational secular Israeli leadership is to cancel your own intelligence.
Dan Kervick’s rationale is ‘perfect’ from his side of the coin until he flips it on the other side and destroys his argument by his own suggestions. On the one hand he advocates a “strong prescriptive diplomacy from the OUTSIDE, along with clear and credible promises of sanctions and incentives,” (M.E.) and on the other, “the US could do more to support and publicize international investigations into war crimes stemming from the Gaza conflict, whichever side is accused of committing those crimes.” That is, while he is putting either Palestinians or Israelis against the wall and 'shooting them for war crimes', he still believes, after his provocative and ‘incendiary’ suggestion, that the “international community” will be able to force the two parties to the negotiating table that will “result in a durable peace.”
It’s obvious that Kervick is an impresario in vaudevillian strategic scenarios. And of course he will not reply to this post and address and bridge this huge gap in his argument as he lacks the moral and intellectual fortitude to do so.
P.S. In the first paragraph the quote is from Jim Lobe, but Steve himself is a strong believer in this political equivalence between the two parties as he argued recently in his posts.
Dan Kervick says,
Kotzabasis,
My view is that the imposition of an international final disposition plan will require mobilizing governments and their peoples to be prepared to impose firm sanctions on one or both sides, if either side fails to abide by the mandated terms of the plan.
This is challenging since the Arab world is full of apologists for Palestinian terrorism and gangsterism, and the American and European side is full of apologists for Israeli ethnic cleansing, brutality and collective punishment. But pressing the international legal case against violators on both sides will diminish their reputations. It will be harder for American supporters of Israel and Arab supporters of the Palestinians to cry "foul" over sanctions if some Israeli and Palestinian soldiers and leaders are on trial before international tribunals for their crimes.
If the global public case is more effectively built that these are *two* outlaw enterprises, that will give foreign governments the political cover they need to take a harder line and threaten sanctions. The case is actually quite easy to make. We just need the Israelis' and Palestinians' many global allies to stop running so much interference for them.
You should re-read my proposal, because I explicitly rejected an approach based on "getting the parties to the negotiating table". My view is that we are at the point where the international community needs to mandate a solution, and then impose it on the parties with carrots and sticks. There is no longer anything to negotiate. We all know the shape of the solution, and this long-running gang war is a dangerous and costly threat to peace and stability.
I am not sure what you are talking about when you shout about shooting people for their war crimes. I assume you are speaking figuratively. I am only contemplating jail sentences and the threat of jail sentences. The important thing is to start putting people on trial.
Kotzabasis says,
I was wrong in regard to his moral fortitude but not wrong in regard to his intellectual argument.
Resolution of the Palestinian Israel Conflict
By Con George-Kotzabasis
My dear Steve,
You seem to be afflicted with an incurable cancerous growth in your continued rambling ‘cogitations’ of equating “the recklessness, immaturity and sheer stupidity of leadership on of all sides.” To perceive a political equivalence between a fanatic religiously motivated Palestinian leadership and a rational secular Israeli leadership is to cancel your own intelligence.
Dan Kervick’s rationale is ‘perfect’ from his side of the coin until he flips it on the other side and destroys his argument by his own suggestions. On the one hand he advocates a “strong prescriptive diplomacy from the OUTSIDE, along with clear and credible promises of sanctions and incentives,” (M.E.) and on the other, “the US could do more to support and publicize international investigations into war crimes stemming from the Gaza conflict, whichever side is accused of committing those crimes.” That is, while he is putting either Palestinians or Israelis against the wall and 'shooting them for war crimes', he still believes, after his provocative and ‘incendiary’ suggestion, that the “international community” will be able to force the two parties to the negotiating table that will “result in a durable peace.”
It’s obvious that Kervick is an impresario in vaudevillian strategic scenarios. And of course he will not reply to this post and address and bridge this huge gap in his argument as he lacks the moral and intellectual fortitude to do so.
P.S. In the first paragraph the quote is from Jim Lobe, but Steve himself is a strong believer in this political equivalence between the two parties as he argued recently in his posts.
Dan Kervick says,
Kotzabasis,
My view is that the imposition of an international final disposition plan will require mobilizing governments and their peoples to be prepared to impose firm sanctions on one or both sides, if either side fails to abide by the mandated terms of the plan.
This is challenging since the Arab world is full of apologists for Palestinian terrorism and gangsterism, and the American and European side is full of apologists for Israeli ethnic cleansing, brutality and collective punishment. But pressing the international legal case against violators on both sides will diminish their reputations. It will be harder for American supporters of Israel and Arab supporters of the Palestinians to cry "foul" over sanctions if some Israeli and Palestinian soldiers and leaders are on trial before international tribunals for their crimes.
If the global public case is more effectively built that these are *two* outlaw enterprises, that will give foreign governments the political cover they need to take a harder line and threaten sanctions. The case is actually quite easy to make. We just need the Israelis' and Palestinians' many global allies to stop running so much interference for them.
You should re-read my proposal, because I explicitly rejected an approach based on "getting the parties to the negotiating table". My view is that we are at the point where the international community needs to mandate a solution, and then impose it on the parties with carrots and sticks. There is no longer anything to negotiate. We all know the shape of the solution, and this long-running gang war is a dangerous and costly threat to peace and stability.
I am not sure what you are talking about when you shout about shooting people for their war crimes. I assume you are speaking figuratively. I am only contemplating jail sentences and the threat of jail sentences. The important thing is to start putting people on trial.
Kotzabasis says,
I was wrong in regard to his moral fortitude but not wrong in regard to his intellectual argument.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Obama is Responsible for his Failures not his Advisors
By Con George-Kotzabasis
Steve Clemons risen from his tub, after a nightmarish nap about the happenings of the White House, lit Diogenes lamp and stepped out in the full daylight searching desperately for the man, the “true” Obama, who would perform the “strategic leaps” and forswear the “incrementalist policy paths” of failure, when already under the brightness of the sun Obama has been shown to be a political novitiate sans political acumen, sans imagination, and a weak and timorous character to boot. To expect such a person, as Clemons does, to take bold steps and make strategic leaps, is to remarkably indulge in an exercise of Fata Morgana. The trouble for Obama does not lie in the method he is using to implement his policies, i.e., incrementalist or leaping, but in the wrongness of these policies in themselves. Already he has made some “strategic leaps” with his open door diplomacy toward Iran only to fall and break the backbone of this ‘olive branch’ diplomacy in the abyss of mullahcratic intransigence, as well as in his “strategic” attempt to change the ‘narrative’ of global terror by so called ‘smart policies’, ‘soft power’, and apologies to the aggrieved that would change the views and conduct of the fanatical enemies of America toward it. It is the combination of crafting wrong fallacious policies in domestic and foreign affairs primarily and the “knife throwing” ethos of Chicago politics, as embodied in Rahm Emanuel that is sinking the Obama presidency and not the strong grip his four advisors, namely, Axelrod, Emanuel, Jarret, and Gilps, have upon Obama. It is in his personal ‘portfolio’ that the problem is couched. His egregious lack of CEO skills, as another commentator above suggests, his lack of experience and character which are completely out of sync with the position of a chief executive with the stupendous demands in insight, imagination, decisiveness, and fortitude that Obama does not possess that make him a ditto Carteresque effete president and therefore politically dispensable.
Hence the problem cannot be resolved, as Clemons erroneously believes, by replacing some of his advisors but only by replacing Obama himself from the presidency by the end of the three long years ahead. But the liberals loath to admit where the solution lies as they will have to ‘lock’ themselves for their intellectual offense of electing Obama in a ‘sing-sing’ in a resounding choir of mea culpas. As I’ve said a year ago, more than half of America elected as president a lemon as a result of their pathological hate for The Bush-Cheney administration and by association the GPO. Now they are reaping the winds of that fateful sickly stupid decision. The lemon is in the process of being squeezed out, but the danger lies that by the end of this process America might be squeezed out of its own strength.
By Con George-Kotzabasis
Steve Clemons risen from his tub, after a nightmarish nap about the happenings of the White House, lit Diogenes lamp and stepped out in the full daylight searching desperately for the man, the “true” Obama, who would perform the “strategic leaps” and forswear the “incrementalist policy paths” of failure, when already under the brightness of the sun Obama has been shown to be a political novitiate sans political acumen, sans imagination, and a weak and timorous character to boot. To expect such a person, as Clemons does, to take bold steps and make strategic leaps, is to remarkably indulge in an exercise of Fata Morgana. The trouble for Obama does not lie in the method he is using to implement his policies, i.e., incrementalist or leaping, but in the wrongness of these policies in themselves. Already he has made some “strategic leaps” with his open door diplomacy toward Iran only to fall and break the backbone of this ‘olive branch’ diplomacy in the abyss of mullahcratic intransigence, as well as in his “strategic” attempt to change the ‘narrative’ of global terror by so called ‘smart policies’, ‘soft power’, and apologies to the aggrieved that would change the views and conduct of the fanatical enemies of America toward it. It is the combination of crafting wrong fallacious policies in domestic and foreign affairs primarily and the “knife throwing” ethos of Chicago politics, as embodied in Rahm Emanuel that is sinking the Obama presidency and not the strong grip his four advisors, namely, Axelrod, Emanuel, Jarret, and Gilps, have upon Obama. It is in his personal ‘portfolio’ that the problem is couched. His egregious lack of CEO skills, as another commentator above suggests, his lack of experience and character which are completely out of sync with the position of a chief executive with the stupendous demands in insight, imagination, decisiveness, and fortitude that Obama does not possess that make him a ditto Carteresque effete president and therefore politically dispensable.
Hence the problem cannot be resolved, as Clemons erroneously believes, by replacing some of his advisors but only by replacing Obama himself from the presidency by the end of the three long years ahead. But the liberals loath to admit where the solution lies as they will have to ‘lock’ themselves for their intellectual offense of electing Obama in a ‘sing-sing’ in a resounding choir of mea culpas. As I’ve said a year ago, more than half of America elected as president a lemon as a result of their pathological hate for The Bush-Cheney administration and by association the GPO. Now they are reaping the winds of that fateful sickly stupid decision. The lemon is in the process of being squeezed out, but the danger lies that by the end of this process America might be squeezed out of its own strength.
Sunday, May 02, 2010
Senator Schumer’s Correctness in Criticizing Obama’s Doltish and Inconsistent Diplomacy
By Con George-Kotzabasis
Would Edward Luce and Daniel Dombey, and by implication Steve Clemons, expect Robert Gibbs to say that Barack Obama agrees “with what Senator Schumer said? It is astonishing to see Clemons diverting the issue of the total freeze of settlements, which Schumer correctly criticized as a grave error on the part of Obama contra Israel, to what Schumer’s stand was to Jesse Helms and to John Bolton “few years ago.”
Clemons is entitled to his opinions but he is not entitled to his facts. The facts are that the foolish imposition of the total freeze of settlements on the Netanyahu government by the Obama administration’s lack of foresight that it would be politically unrealizable for Israel and that it would evolve and become for the Palestinians, as it did, a rigid condition for their participation with any talks with Israel, was the major factor that derailed Obama’s engine of diplomacy from its track that would bring the two belligerents to the negotiating table. It was precisely this quintessentially wrong and injudicious policy of Obama that Senator Schumer rightly criticized as being the reason of the administration’s abysmal failure in the Middle East. Another fact is that Obama’s diplomacy is inconsistent, rewarding his enemies and penalizing his friends. While he claims that his diplomacy is indiscriminate and is based on soft and smart power coming on doves’ feet and extends his hand in a velvet glove to the enemies of America, he carries a bludgeon in his hand in his relations with his strongest and most loyal ally, in this case Israel.
Throughout history there has never been a case when a nation engaged in war with implacable enemies would chastise and alienate its most steadfast and reliable ally for the purpose to placate its enemies. Obama will go down in history as the only leader who not only doltishly and doggedly opened the door of diplomacy to an enemy such as Iran which has been training in its own country members of the Taliban and supplying them with weapons--as well as its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah--to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, but who was also willing to sacrifice the vital interests of his most staunch ally against Islamist terror, Israel, on the altar of this spineless, strategically unprincipled, and totally fallible diplomacy.
The above emitted the two following responses:
Posted by Dan Kervick, Apr 27 2010, 6:54AM - Link
Kotzabasis, WigWag seemed to be wondering a few days ago why those posts in which you make a serious, debatable point are ignored. But can there be any doubt why people habitually turn you off, when so many of your posts consist in cowardly, third-person personal characterizations of other contributors, lamely shouted out to no one in particular?
Posted by WigWag, Apr 27 2010, 9:45AM - Link
Actually why the interesting point Kotz made is never debated is rather plain. His point was an astute one, but as I am sure Kotz would be the first to admit, it was hardly an original one. Kotz was making precisely the same point Schumer was; that by offering to conduct their negotiations for them, the Obama Administration provides an incentive for the Palestinians not to negotiate at all. Kotz, Schumer and many other sage observers have also made the point that by making demands on Israel that Obama knew, or should have known, that it wouldn't comply with, it was Obama himself who was making his stated goal of getting negotiations started much more difficult.
Steve Clemons in his diatribe against Schumer never responded to this point and Dan Kervick hasn't either. Neither has any other serious commentator as far as I can tell.
It seems to me that the lack of response to the Schumer/Kotz allegation is evidence of the fact that the point is irrefutable.
If it's not, someone should give it a try.
By Con George-Kotzabasis
Would Edward Luce and Daniel Dombey, and by implication Steve Clemons, expect Robert Gibbs to say that Barack Obama agrees “with what Senator Schumer said? It is astonishing to see Clemons diverting the issue of the total freeze of settlements, which Schumer correctly criticized as a grave error on the part of Obama contra Israel, to what Schumer’s stand was to Jesse Helms and to John Bolton “few years ago.”
Clemons is entitled to his opinions but he is not entitled to his facts. The facts are that the foolish imposition of the total freeze of settlements on the Netanyahu government by the Obama administration’s lack of foresight that it would be politically unrealizable for Israel and that it would evolve and become for the Palestinians, as it did, a rigid condition for their participation with any talks with Israel, was the major factor that derailed Obama’s engine of diplomacy from its track that would bring the two belligerents to the negotiating table. It was precisely this quintessentially wrong and injudicious policy of Obama that Senator Schumer rightly criticized as being the reason of the administration’s abysmal failure in the Middle East. Another fact is that Obama’s diplomacy is inconsistent, rewarding his enemies and penalizing his friends. While he claims that his diplomacy is indiscriminate and is based on soft and smart power coming on doves’ feet and extends his hand in a velvet glove to the enemies of America, he carries a bludgeon in his hand in his relations with his strongest and most loyal ally, in this case Israel.
Throughout history there has never been a case when a nation engaged in war with implacable enemies would chastise and alienate its most steadfast and reliable ally for the purpose to placate its enemies. Obama will go down in history as the only leader who not only doltishly and doggedly opened the door of diplomacy to an enemy such as Iran which has been training in its own country members of the Taliban and supplying them with weapons--as well as its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah--to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, but who was also willing to sacrifice the vital interests of his most staunch ally against Islamist terror, Israel, on the altar of this spineless, strategically unprincipled, and totally fallible diplomacy.
The above emitted the two following responses:
Posted by Dan Kervick, Apr 27 2010, 6:54AM - Link
Kotzabasis, WigWag seemed to be wondering a few days ago why those posts in which you make a serious, debatable point are ignored. But can there be any doubt why people habitually turn you off, when so many of your posts consist in cowardly, third-person personal characterizations of other contributors, lamely shouted out to no one in particular?
Posted by WigWag, Apr 27 2010, 9:45AM - Link
Actually why the interesting point Kotz made is never debated is rather plain. His point was an astute one, but as I am sure Kotz would be the first to admit, it was hardly an original one. Kotz was making precisely the same point Schumer was; that by offering to conduct their negotiations for them, the Obama Administration provides an incentive for the Palestinians not to negotiate at all. Kotz, Schumer and many other sage observers have also made the point that by making demands on Israel that Obama knew, or should have known, that it wouldn't comply with, it was Obama himself who was making his stated goal of getting negotiations started much more difficult.
Steve Clemons in his diatribe against Schumer never responded to this point and Dan Kervick hasn't either. Neither has any other serious commentator as far as I can tell.
It seems to me that the lack of response to the Schumer/Kotz allegation is evidence of the fact that the point is irrefutable.
If it's not, someone should give it a try.
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