Instapundit's latest (link not yet working) on the Palestinians reminds me of something I started a few weeks ago, but never finished. It is unfortunately still horribly pertinent. This comment of I-330.org (item 10 on March 4th) reminded me of something I've been mulling over for quite a while:
Charles at Little Green Footballs talks about a love gone sour:
I used to be much more open to the Palestinian cause. But as my knowledge of the situation has grown, I find I simply can’t empathize any longer with a society that uses its own children as pawns, sacrificing them on an altar of hate and anti-Semitism with no hope, and turns its back on every opportunity for a peaceful solution, instead pursuing a goal of purposeful, monstrous genocide.
Join the club. I used to be pro-Palestinian too. Repeated viewings of Lawrence of Arabia will do that to you. And when the best restaurant in town is run by a family of decent, friendly Palestinians, well, it sways a man. Throw in a couple of Islamophile professors, and you've got a budding student Arabist on your hands.
But then there's television. And the news. And recent history. And the sympathies I wanted do not concur with the sympathies I now have.
I don't know that I've ever been particularly pro-Palestinian. I always thought that the refugees ought to be invited to settle in the houses abandoned by the hundreds of thousands of Jews driven out of the Arab countries to Israel. That seemed a fair trade. And I can't recall ever not loathing and despising Yasser Arafat and, well, every other self-appointed leader of the Palestinian cause.
However, I was never entirely hostile to the Palestinians until September 11th. When I saw the crowds cheering on the destruction of the World Trade Center, my immediate reaction was "these people will never have a homeland of their own".
It seems to me that the Palestinians are going down the same path as the 'Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam', and that it may already be too late to turn back. The Sri Lankan Tamils were genuine victims of severe discrimination, and this would have justified quite a lot in the way of resistance, perhaps even armed rebellion. But after so many years of grinding brutality (heartily reciprocated, of course) and mass murder, so many assassinations by suicide bombers who were often young women, the Tamils seem to have lost most of the sympathy they once had from the outside world, and quite rightly.
Even if they win, it is hard to believe that a Palestinian (or Tamil) state built on a stinking heap of corpses of women and children could be anything but a hellhole for centuries to come.
Posted by Dr. Weevil at March 24, 2002 10:10 PM