For the first time in years, serious Israeli-Arab peace moves seem to be afoot. The key mover is Saudi Arabia, and the key document is a 2002 peace initiative that it sponsored.
Even Europe had to admit that the Mecca agreement fell short on all three counts.
That left European officials with a dilemma: Should they continue to boycott the P.A. government or fudge Europe\’s conditions enough so it can argue that the new P.A. government has met them?
There\’s a controversy that has bubbled up in the Jewish world today around this question: Is it good for Israel when Jews go public with harsh criticism of Israel?
Like his father, Daniel Pipes has a reputation for bluntness and a willingness to go against conventional wisdom — both in the academy and elsewhere. Whereas Richard Pipes sounded the alarm against appeasing the Soviets, Daniel Pipes preaches against working with radical Muslims, no matter how law-abiding, scholarly or open-minded they might appear.
Iraq is a mess, a cauldron of intra-Islamic conflict. Afghanistan is heading down the same tragic path, as the Taliban assert greater fundamentalist control. All those Muslims are nuts, right?\n\nThen there\’s Azerbaijan.
We must recognize the fact that though sympathy for Iran\’s expressed goal of Israel\’s destruction is hardly mainstream, the idea of a world without Israel is more acceptable in polite company, the media and academia today than Hitler\’s expressed goal of a Europe without Jews was in 1939.
What happens next will depend on how skillfully the parties maneuver in trying to advance their often disparate agendas.
According to all available polls, a large majority of Americans want to bring our involvement in Iraq to an end, and an overwhelming majority of Iraqis themselves are opposed to the continued American occupation of their country.
\”If we\’re going to end this conflict,\” former U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis Ross conveyed in the video clip, \”we need to address matters from the grass roots on up.\”
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