Deeds, Not Words
In response to seething dissatisfaction about US policy on the Palestinian issue in the ME, Karen Hughes set up an impropmtu meeting between Palestinian diplomats in the US and the President.During Hughes's trip to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, she told reporters that she was surprised Bush had not received more credit for his efforts on the establishment of a Palestinian state. At almost every public forum, Hughes highlighted Bush's support for Palestinian statehood as a way of rebutting the perception that the administration leans toward Israel on the key issues needed to achieve a peace deal.Post Gaza, for the Palestinians to claim that Bush's support of a Palestinian state is mere words, not deeds, sounds like the usual Palestinian victim rhetoric. As though nothing has changed. Nothing substantial has been done. And for her to fall for this line, when the Palestinians have done nothing to ameliorate the rising terrorism in Gaza, does not reassure me that she understands how politics works in the ME, where making concessions is seen as weakness, not strength. Perhaps she should have pressed them on the point as to why they view actual progress on the ground - the handing over of Gaza - only as words, not deeds. And asked them what actions they had contributed to ameliorating the situation. Karen Hughes, with her maternal sensibility unschooled in ME politics, just strikes me, over and over, as the wrong women for this job.
But Arabs have complained that Bush's support for statehood has been merely words. "The slogan of a Palestinian state is not enough," said Randa Siniora, general director of Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights group in Ramallah, West Bank. "These words have to be translated into real deeds."
See also, this post.
In other news, Palestinians still have not figured out that Arafat died of AIDS. Because they didn't allow those tests to be performed.
The official investigation into the death of Yasser Arafat failed to determine what killed the longtime Palestinian leader, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia said Wednesday.Of course, it is rather hard to find AIDS, if you do not allow the doctors to test for it, as in this case.
Qureia said the special committee that led the investigation would publish the results later Wednesday, along with a report by the French doctors who treated Arafat.
"French and Palestinian doctors who treated the martyred brother found that medicine could not find the disease which infected Arafat, neither viruses, nor germs, nor AIDS, nor bacteria," Qureia said.
posted by Alcibiades @ 12:05 PM
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