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Bush Plays Pontius Pilate
BY CHARLEY REESE
FOR FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2002
The tragedy of the Palestinian people is an indelible stain on Western
civilization in general and on America in particular. President George Bush
has played Pontius Pilate and turned his back while Israelis crucify
Palestinians.
These people are the last victims of racist colonialism in all its ugliness,
brutality and duplicity.
I don't know whether President Bush is naive and doesn't realize what Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon is doing, or if he does know and condones it.
The latter would be far worse than the former.
Sharon is neither defending Israel nor pursuing terrorists. He is doing what
he has planned to do from the very beginning — destroy the Palestinian
Authority and thus the peace process, and wreck what's left of the
infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza.
Sharon believes that will leave the Palestinians where he wants them —
leaderless, impoverished and demoralized. I think he will fail, though the
time ahead will be bad for the Palestinians, as impossible as that sounds
given the suffering they've already endured in recent decades.
It is now obvious that no one in Washington has the courage to face the
junkyard dogs of the Israeli lobby. Arab governments will not go to war to
save the Palestinians because they know they cannot win a war against the
Israelis and the United States. They would be subjecting their people to
slaughter and their economies to ruin for nothing. But they won't forget.
And an arrogant Israel might force them into a war.
While the Israelis put on their usual false face to the international media,
moaning about how difficult and dangerous this operation is, just remember
that it is an army against civilians. Some brave Palestinians armed only
with rifles have resisted, but a rifleman can't do much against a main battle
tank protected by infantry, snipers, F- 16s and helicopters.
The Israelis move into a town and immediately shut the press out by
declaring it a "closed military area." The meek and submissive press then
covers its eyes and ears while the Israelis do their dirty work cloaked in
secrecy. Some America TV talkers act surprised when the Israel Defense
Forces takes another city. Well, I can tell you right now that the Israelis
are going all the way to the Gaza Strip. They plan on being there for months.
Nevertheless, Sharon will fail. Israel will know no peace. One of the lies
Israel uses in its nonstop barrage of slander against the Palestinians is that
families teach their children to hate Israelis. Nothing is further from the
truth. It is Israeli behavior that teaches children to hate Israelis. A military
friend related a story of how IDF members operated in Lebanon. They went into a
house, wrecked it, beat the father in front of his wife and children, then dropped
their pants and defecated on the coffee table in front of the family. Do you think
those children, watching their parents' humiliation, will have to read a book to hate
Israelis? Even the American officer came away hating Israelis.
Or what about the father in the West Bank trying to drive his daughter to a
hospital only five miles away. He was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint and
refused passage. His little girl died in his arms an hour or so later when
her appendix burst. Do you think anyone has to teach that bereaved father to
hate Israelis? You could write a 1,000-page book telling individual stories
of Israeli cruelty and the brutality they routinely display toward
Palestinians.
So Sharon's problem is not a few terrorists. Sharon's problem is the entire
Palestinian population. When people are made miserable and hopeless, they
don't mind dying. As much as the Israelis would like to, they can't kill
them all, and they can't beat them into submission. As long as the Palestinians
have no state, Israel will have no security. I have great admiration for
the Palestinians, but much less for George Bush, who is endangering
Americans with his feckless subservience to Israel.
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Charley Reese can be contacted at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
© 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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