'Death to America!'--Nothing Personal

Today’s Dearborn Press & Guide has an anti-Israel, pro-Hamas opinion piece,“Where will Obama take our foreign policy?” (For some reason most of the P&G’s opinion columns don’t make it into the online edition). As usual, there is no piece from the other side.

The author, Bob A. Rabboh, is described as a Dearborn resident and a college lecturer in “economics and African political systems.” Despite the headline, Rabboh isn’t really as interested in analyzing the President-elect’s foreign policy vision as he is in condemning Israel. Sample:

“[G]enocidal bombings of the Gaza strip,". . . ."One cannot view this crisis outside of the context of Israel’s long and cruel history in Gaza, which has been criminal, by any measure of international law and conventions.” Rabboh adds that, “few have ever experienced what the people of Gaza are now enduring.”

Now that last sentence makes a good point. History has no precedent for a military offensive calling time-outs in order to ship food, water, and medical supplies to the civilian population. Nor do we know of any prior instance of a population freely electing to be ruled by a religious junta whose only campaign promise was to provoke its better-armed neighbor into calamitous war as soon as possible--and then when the promised response comes to see a lot of the same voters telling CNN they're innocent victims!

This is the Press & Guide, so it’s no surprise when Rabboh doesn’t manage to squeeze any mention of Hamas into his column. He tacks pretty close to the expected line on the Arab-Israeli conflict: the only alternative he sees to “more radical extremists and chaos in the Middle East and North Africa. . . . is to end the occupation.” Yes, it’s true that Israel withdrew completely from Gaza, and that the Palestinian Authority, not Israel, are in charge in the West Bank. But by now we’ve all learned that “ending the occupation” is only code language for the destruction of Israel. Israel has to stop occupying the planet.

Rabboh says he’s analyzing the situation “from the international perspective.” But the international perspective always reduces Islamic terrorism and the growing menace of global jihadism except to a response to the situation of the Palestinians. (Which I suppose is why Rabboh's "analysis" also fails to mention either Islam or the Koran). Because, Rabboh explains, the U.S. government chooses to engage only “a few ‘moderate or subordinate [?]’ Arab governments instead of the people,” the U.S. remains ignorant of what the “people” are thinking. As a consequence, the everyday Arab and Muslim resents the U.S. role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. In my favorite line in the column, Rabboh adds this: “This resentment is strictly aimed at the policy makers, and not the American people.”

Oh, it is to laugh! Like the policy makers in the World Trade Center, I suppose, or on Flight 98? Does this mean that when Palestinians danced on 9/11 and Iranians and Hezbollah chant, “Death to America!,” it’s not aimed at me, just my democratically-elected leaders?

I never realized white-hot Muslim resentment was able to make such fine distinctions.