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David Horovitz: Vindication
To be targeted daily by Palestinian terrorists is bad enough. To be told incessantly by much of a watching world leadership that we deserve it, has added unbearable insult to intolerable injury.
And that is why, at the end of another murderous month, Israelis can feel a certain cautious appreciation for a chief executive and a profound sense of gratitude to a president.
The one-two punch of suicide bombings on consecutive days in Jerusalem, viciously robbing 26 Israelis of their lives, was initially compounded by a jaw-dropping welter of inane remarks from a quite extraordinary array of ill-qualified commentators. British Prime Minister Tony Blair�s wife and foreign secretary took pains to empathize with the bombers� sense of hopelessness. Archbishop Desmond Tutu called for divestment of holdings in Israel. EU officials contended that there was no evidence of Yasser Arafat diverting funds to finance terror groups. Kofi Annan, silent when the bombers struck, piped up to express his concern over the consequent army incursions into West Bank cities. And then there was CNN founder (and still AOL Time Warner vice chairman) Ted Turner, musing as to who the real terrorists were. Presumably Turner had been watching too much of his own station, where, following the Petah Tikvah bombing on May 27, considerably more network time was given not to the harrowing interview conducted by a correspondent with Chen Keinan, who had lost her baby and her mother, but to the "explanations" of the bomber�s mother for his murderous actions.
A first hint of a world slowly being set right came from CNN�s chief news executive Eason Jordan, dispatched to the region as Israel fumed over Turner�s remarks and Keinan�s treatment in particular, and 21 months of all too frequently tendentious coverage in general. Jordan candidly acknowledged the mistakes made in the Keinan case, vowed that the network would henceforth show more concern for terror�s victims than its perpetrators, and said that bombers� farewell videotapes and interviews with their families would now only be screened in exceptional circumstances. Speaking amid pressure to remove CNN and the BBC from the basic package offered to Israeli cable and satellite viewers, and to make them available only to Israelis wanting to pay extra, Jordan was clearly engaged in a damage-control exercise. But his comments and pledges were welcome nonetheless -- particularly when contrasted with the BBC. Often as culpable on its 24-hour World TV network of drawing equivalencies, or worse, between those who orchestrate and those who try to counter terrorism, it maintained a lofty official silence.
Genuine relief, though, came with President Bush�s devastating June 24 verbal assault on the Palestinian Authority -- his demand, as a precondition for Palestinian statehood, for the ouster not only of Yasser Arafat, but of the entire leadership echelon that has presided over systematic terrorism while so adroitly peddling the lie that what we have been enduring is a popular uprising against occupation. What rare joy to witness that symbol of televised integrity, Saeb Erekat -- he of the 500-massacred-in Jenin falsehood, the Israeli-firebombing-assault-on-the-Church-of-the-Nativity fabrication, and the West-Bank-fence-as-new-apartheid distortion -- spluttering desperately about plans for elections and reforms, after Bush had made plain that he and his colleagues had lost all credibility, and that reform meant "more than cosmetic change or veiled attempt to preserve the status quo."
Cutting through all the months of misrepresentation, Bush�s speech was firm in its branding of Arafat�s PA regime as corrupt, unjust, an all-round failure. It was merciless in its dismissal of Arafat�s disingenuous recent claim to be ready, 21 months and 2,000 dead after he missed the boat, to accept former president Clinton�s peace blueprint. It was unequivocal in its deflation of Arafat�s pretense to be battling the bombers, its flat characterization of the PA as a regime encouraging terrorism -- a regime, that is, on the wrong side of the post-September 11 struggle between good and evil.
Quite how his administration now expects the Palestinian people to use their circumscribed democracy to sideline Arafat, Erekat et al., and thus set the region on the path to two states coexisting in genuine peace, and normalized ties for Israel with the Arab world, is hard to fathom. Arafat has fathered so murderous a climate of hostility that his falling domestic popularity is, absurdly, a consequence of his manipulated people�s perception of him as a moderate.
But as all who genuinely yearn for peace now look anxiously for Bush to translate fine words into action, while praying that the inevitable next waves of bombers will reap no more innocent lives, it is worth savoring that muchdelayed pleasure, that vindication -- those few minutes outside the White House when the leader of the free world acknowledged the Palestinians� right to the democratic state, rule of law, thriving economy and simple hope that Arafat is denying them, while confirming what most Israelis know so dearly to be true: That, as he put it, we have "lived too long with fear and funerals, having to avoid markets and public transportation, and forced to put armed guards in kindergarten classrooms. The Palestinian Authority has rejected your offered hand, and trafficked with terrorists. You have a right to a normal life; you have a right to security; and I deeply believe that you need a reformed, responsible Palestinian partner to achieve that security."
Thank you, Mr. President. We believe that too.
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