Pawns

The Boston Globe has a piece on how the Palestinian civil war is playing in the Middle East:

Palestinians killing Palestinians was a nightmare come true, not just for the Middle East, but for the greater Muslim community as well. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz of Pakistan said that the Palestinian problem was at ” the core of stability” for the world, and that the lack of rights for Palestinians fostered terrorism.

Crocodile tears.

The reality is that the Palestinians have been used as pawns in the pan-Arab game of fighting Israel since 1948. If the Arabs really cared about the Palestinians they wouldn’t be enabling their campaign of terrorism to such a degree. Instead, the terrible situation in Palestine is the result of years of breeding a death cult that has no turned on itself since it can no longer strike at Israel. What is happening now is the result of years of Arab nations pushing the Palestinians towards the nihilistic world of jihad — proxy warriors for a battle that could not be won by conventional means.

The problem of Palestine is hardly at the “core of stability” for the world — it’s an excuse for Muslim nations to stall reform and covertly embrace terrorism. Solving the Israel-Palestine crisis wouldn’t effect the situation in Iraq, it wouldn’t make Syria more democratic, and it wouldn’t end the Islamist campaign of terrorism. It’s nothing more than a convenient way of shifting the blame for decades of failure, hatred, and terrorism which has become the bloody status quo in the Middle East.

Ralph Peters makes a strong argument for why the Palestinians are merely pawns:

The truth is that other Arabs want the Palestinians to continue to suffer. It’s useful as an excuse for all their failings. They have about as much sympathy for the refugees as all those good Germans had for the Jews whose real estate was suddenly available.

But the ultimate victims of this round of Palestinian violence are the Palestinians themselves.

After passing up so many chances for peace and statehood, they can no longer be classed as victims of Zionism. Yet the Palestinians are victims – of the other Arabs who exploit them and neglect them. And of the madmen spawned from their own kind.

If you need someone to blame for the current carnage, blame the Palestinian terrorists for whom violence has become a way of life (and death). Forget the rage of the dispossessed and all that sanctimonious claptrap. For the Palestinians preying upon their brethren, terror’s a business.

And business is good.

He’s sadly right. The true victims of this are the decent members of Palestinian society — the ones who have watched their people become human munitions in a pointless proxy war. The ones who watch money be sent to the families of duped suicide bombers rather than to schools or hospitals. The ones who have watched their society be degenerated into a death cult, making civil society virtually impossible. Those who know what’s happening, but can do little to prevent it.

The Arabs have spend 50 years sowing the wind, and now they’re shocked that it has resulted in a state that is tearing itself apart? What could they expect from a society that they’ve deliberately steeped in violence for generations.

This is what happens when civil society is replaced with jihad, and the governments of the Middle East may see this malignant ideology spread beyond Gaza and Baghdad — they’ve been hoping that paying it off would make it leave their borders, but the combination of religious fundamentalism and indoctrinated violence is a beast that may yet turn on its masters within our lifetimes.