The man who won't lie for peace

Wishful thinking pervades discussion of some fancied Middle East "peace process". Here's an excellent video of a lecture given at Yale by Prof. Barry Rubin that touches on many issues but especially on the nature of Arab antisemitism and why, at the end of the day, Israel simply cannot exist in the Arab mind. That's to say, the predominant ideology in the Arab world, in which Jews are but weak, evil, and dhimmis, believes Israel is but a short-term fluke, a Western mistake, or conspiracy, that is bound to fail; and hence it is worth doing whatever it takes to wait for the final victory when Israel will be wiped off the map. Rubin does not tell us what the "liberal" West wants to hear about some "solution" to the Arab-Israeli problem being already known, if only everyone can compromise a little. He refuses to lie for peace. The West, he says, has fancied that it can reshape the Arab and Muslim worlds to adapt liberal values. What is really going on is that Western thinking is being reshaped by Arab and Islamic antisemitiam and anti-Western values. It's a long video but, as Gil Bailie (ht) says, worthwhile. It seems that Rubin believes that in the short term, at least, it is ordinary Muslims whose live are much more threatened by the Islamists and the lies the West tells, than is Israel where people have actually learned from experience. Indeed the great threat is the expected appeasement, by the Arabs, of Iran, when the latter gets nuclear weapons. This, Rubin suggests, will increase the likelihood of something akin to the Iranian Revolution, or Talebanization, in the Arab countries.

Professor Barry Rubin - "How the PLO 'Adapted' Antisemitism as 'Anti-Zionism'" from YIISA on Vimeo.