A few days ago it was reported that Obama lifted a freeze on a $192 million aid package to the Palestinian Authority instituted by Congress when the Palestinian dictator Mahmoud Abbas "defied US pressure and sought to attain UN endorsement of Palestinian statehood last September."
The AFP news agency quoted White House spokesman Tommy Vietor as saying the $192 million aid package would be devoted to “ensuring the continued viability of the moderate PA government under the leadership of [Palestinian Authority] President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.”
It seems obvious that the Obama administration, if not the progressive-left more generally, has lost touch with reality... if ever they had any such "touch" with reality. In the world of Obama supporters, a fascist Palestinian dictator is "moderate" while a conservative Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is a hard-line right-wing "extremist."
Dr. Richard Landes put it like this:
Moderate vs. extremist… left vs. right… dove vs. hawk… none of these ranges mean anything anymore because a moderate in the Palestinian system (e.g. Mahmoud Abbas) does not translate into a moderate in ours, and a “hardliner” in ours is a (way too) soft-liner in theirs. Someone who promises his people the land from river to the sea, who demands the ethnic transfer and cleansing of a religious minority from territory he rules, who wants to keep his own people stateless, whose “authorities” bully and intimidate the press, who uses torture against his own opposition is not a “moderate.” And any Israeli leader with that kind of record would be immediately branded, by Jews and other Westerners alike, as a vicious fascist. Of course, in comparison with genocidal Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Abbas, guilty on all counts of the above, is at least willing to say he’s willing to negotiate (maybe), and therefore appears, on our current political register as “a moderate.”
Netanyahu, who allows a much wider range of dissent and lives by far more demanding democratic principles, is branded a “hawkish,” right-wing, extremist when he resists pressure to compromise with hard right-wing foes. But since holding Palestinians responsible for their choices – suicide bombing, hate propaganda, river-to-the-sea ambitions – would be blaming the victim, it’s so much easier for the politically-correct to blame the “hard-liner, hawk” Netanyahu for the failure of negotiations rather than the “moderate” Abbas.
Landes is, of course, correct. It is not Netanyahu who is the extremist, but dictator Mahmoud Abbas who is. It is not Netanyahu who refuses to negotiate, but Abbas who does, with cover provided from Barack Obama. And, yet, just as the Obama administration told the world that the rise of radical Islam under the so-called "Arab Spring" was something akin to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s (not to mention the American Revolution of 1776), we are also to believe that fascism is "moderate" when it comes from Palestinians.
Could this administration possibly be any more wrong-headed?
If so, it's hard to see just how.
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