What is plain to him, what should be plain to us all, is how Europe's and the UN's wink-and-nod philosophy toward Islamofacsism has come back, bread upon the waters (emphasis mine):
In Causeries du Lundi, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve recalls a Parisian dramatist watching the revolutionary mob rampaging through the street below and beaming: "See my pageant passing!" That's how opportunist Arabs and indulgent Europeans looked on the intifada and the terrorists and the schoolgirl suicide bombers: as a kind of uber-authentic piece of performance art with which to torment the Jews and the Americans. They never paused to ask themselves: Hey, what if it doesn't stop there?
Well, about 30 years too late, they're asking it now. For the first quarter-century of Israel's existence, the Arab states fought more or less conventional wars against the Zionists, and kept losing. So then they figured it was easier to anoint a terrorist movement and in 1974 declared Yasser Arafat's PLO to be the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people," which is quite a claim for an organization then barely half-a-decade old. Amazingly, the Arab League persuaded the U.N. and the EU and Bill Clinton and everyone else to go along with it and to treat the old monster as a head of state who lacked only a state to head. It's true that many nationalist movements have found it convenient to adopt the guise of terrorists. But, as the Palestinian "nationalist" movement descended from airline hijackings to the intifada to self-detonating in pizza parlors, it never occurred to their glamorous patrons to wonder if maybe this was, in fact, a terrorist movement conveniently adopting the guise of nationalism.
Nowadays, with cars set ablaze in Paris and tube stops blown up in London, the common EU reaction has been, Why us? We've always gone to bat for the Muslims against Israel. How stupid. It cannot be repeated enough: they don't hate us for what we do. They hate us for who we are.
This much I know: at any international conference, any economic conference, any pro-peace conference, any Middle East Conference, any talk of dragging the Middle East into the Modern Era--rights for women in Saudi Arabia, rights for gays in Iran--is always drowned out by chants of "Palestine! Palestine!" in whatever hall was being rented. "Palestine" has become the excuse never to change anything in the Middle East, the excuse to keep going the retrograde, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-Enlightenment, anti-democratic route. Of course, "solving" the Paelstinian problem was the last thing these entities wanted, because, what wopuld be left as an excuse? Now, finally, it has occurred to the relatively sane powers in the Arab world--Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan--that forestalling the modern world while complaining about "Palestine!" might come around to hurt them. Steyn again:
They've now belatedly realized they're at that stage in the creature feature where the monster has mutated into something bigger and crazier. Until the remarkably kinda-robust statement by the G-8 and the unprecedented denunciation of Hezbollah by the Arab League, the rule in any conflict in which Israel is involved -- Israel vs. PLO, Israel vs. Lebanon, Israel vs. [Your Team Here] is that the Jews are to blame.
But Saudi-Egyptian-Jordanian opportunism on Palestine has caught up with them: It's finally dawned on them that a strategy of consciously avoiding resolution of the "Palestinian question" has helped deliver Gaza, and Lebanon and Syria, into the hands of a regime that's a far bigger threat to the Arab world than the Zionist Entity. Cairo and Co. grew so accustomed to whining about the Palestinian pseudo-crisis decade in decade out that it never occurred to them that they might face a real crisis one day: a Middle East dominated by an apocalyptic Iran and its local enforcers, in which Arab self-rule turns out to have been a mere interlude between the Ottoman sultans and the eternal eclipse of a Persian nuclear umbrella. The Zionists got out of Gaza and it's now Talibanistan redux. The Zionists got out of Lebanon and the most powerful force in the country (with an ever-growing demographic advantage) are Iran's Shia enforcers. There haven't been any Zionists anywhere near Damascus in 60 years and Syria is in effect Iran's first Sunni Arab prison bitch. For the other regimes in the region, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria are dead states that have risen as vampires.
"First they came for the Jews." Anyone recognize this? It is happening again. Counting the Cold War as World War III, and I'm late noting this, we are currently in the midst of World War IV. Last word to Steyn:
So what is in reality Israel's first non-Arab war is a glimpse of the world the day after tomorrow: The EU and Arab League won't quite spell it out, but, to modify that Le Monde headline, they are all Jews now.
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