Martin Sherman Has Some Words

Sadly, it would be a violation of copyright law for me to post more than a few paragraphs of this piece, but I would definitely encourage you guys to read it in its entirety. - Mike L.

Into The Fray: Assessing Abbas’s address

They are only concerned with using the concept of Palestinian freedom as a weapon against Israeli freedom. – Pilar Rahola, Spanish journalist

The appearance of the Palestinian national personality comes as an answer to Israel’s claim that Palestine is Jewish. – Hussein bin Talal, late king of Jordan

The existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons. The establishment of a Palestinian state is a new tool to continue the fight against Israel. – Zuheir Muhsin, late member of the PLO Executive Council

Something bizarre happened at the UN last Thursday – so bizarre, in fact, it would be difficult to make stuff like this up.

Dysfunctional polity, collapsing economy

The plenary session of the General Assembly was addressed by a man who despite the fact that his term of office expired almost half a decade ago, still purports to be the leader of a people who openly concede they have no real, separate identity, and that the only rationale for their claiming nationhood is to deny that of another UN member state; a man who was forcibly ejected from, and is now barred – on pain of death – from reentering a good portion of the area populated by the people he claims to represent; a people that, despite two decades of unprecedented economic aid and political support, has been unable to create anything remotely resembling a stable, productive civil society.

From the podium, this man, who parades as president of an entity with a dysfunctional polity and a collapsing economy – with a minuscule private sector and a bloated public one, wracked by corruption, and crippled by cronyism, manifestly unsustainable without (and probably even with) massive infusions of foreign funds – launched into a distortive and deceptive diatribe against Israel.

Of course, the fact that without Israeli largesse this man’s regime would implode in very short order, in no way deterred him from his malevolent, mendacious and misleading monologue – which only made the entire event more macabre.

This man, Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a. Abu Mazen), whose regime was permitted to run up a debt amounting to close to a quarter billion dollars for unpaid electricity provided by Israel – which itself makes Israel one of his largest benefactors – accused the very entity propping him up in power of virtually every heinous misdeed known to man.

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You should read the whole thing.