Bloggybottom, a new blog by, well, a certain Mr. Ess, links to, quotes and comments on this rather incoherent press conference by Condi Rice in Ramallah. I have a few words of my own to add. But first, Secretary Rice:
The United States’ position about Hamas has not changed. You know that we list -- continue to view Hamas as a terrorist organization. This is going to be a Palestinian process. But I will say one thing about how the presidential elections went. And that is that the man who said that he was for peace between Israel and the Palestinian people, that he could imagine a future for the Palestinian people where they lived in a state side by side with Israel based on a process that went along the roadmap to the establishment of a Palestinian state, that he could imagine a world in which Palestinian children could grow up without fear, that that is the platform that the Palestinian people chose in the presidential elections
[what happened to the end of this sentence? ed.]. Because I think that is the platform that the Palestinian people -- that expresses the hopes of all people around the world.
Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that, as everyone knows, the palestinian people had no choice in the presidential elections. Or that they had only one choice, which amounts to the same thing. And that this "choice" had nothing to do with "the hopes of all people around the world," or even with the hopes of the palestinian people, for that matter. I'd simply draw your attention to my previous post, here ("there is no place for a Jewish state in Palestine"), and point out that when Abu Mazen talks about the palestinian people living in a state side by side with Israel, he's not talking about the Jewish state of Israel. He's talking about living side by side with a "state of Israel" that's a bi-national secular state, i.e., a non-Jewish state. Despite the efforts of President Bush to nudge them in that direction, neither Abbas nor the rest of the current palestinian leadership accept the notion of a Jewish state. Period. (Remember Aqaba?) And Condoleezza Rice knows this.
I frankly don’t think that it is the dream of mothers and fathers around the world that their children will be suicide bombers. I don’t think it is the dream of people around the world that their children will have no future but one of violence.
[non sequiter alert] And so this is a man of peace, his government is a government that is seeking peace. And it is the goal and the policy of the United States government to support a Palestinian leadership that is, we believe, determined to come to a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The man is not a man of peace. His government is not a government of peace. The current palestinian leadership is determined to come to a peaceful resolution of the conflict by redefining "Israel" in its own twisted image. And Condoleezza Rice knows that, too. She's a rather intelligent woman.
Omri has commentary on another of Condi's obtuse remarks at the same press conference.
