See if you can figure out where, and whom, these quotes come from:
Palestinians watched with hope this week as President Barack Obama called for an Israeli settlement freeze and spoke about the need to move quickly toward statehood alongside President Mahmoud Abbas at the White House.
But despite the clear signal of a shift, there is caution in the West Bank and Gaza as Palestinians judge whether the administration has the mettle to make good on promises which have become all too familiar.
“Obama has new speech, but not yet a strategy,” says Mohammed Khirresh, a Palestinian economist and political analyst, speaking on the sidelines of a Ramallah policy conference sponsored by the Palestinian Center for Media and Research. “The criterion for Obama’s new strategy is whether I can see it on the ground and touch it. Otherwise, it’s empty words.”
Despite his charm and message of change, Obama must still overcome a deficit from decades of failed US policy on mediating an Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Palestinians are weary of a peace process that has been long on talk and short on dividends, and that has eroded the credibility of the president’s diplomatic pulpit. There are also questions whether one president has the political ability to buck decades of US partiality toward Israel.
What do you think? Al Jazeera? The Arab News? Al-Ahram? Reuters?
Nope. The Christian Science Monitor. And the author: Joshua Mitnick. And there’s even more Palestinian propaganda to come:
Still, conditions are less than ideal, because Israel’s right-wing government won’t endorse a two-state solution and because of the ongoing rift with Hamas, a long-time critic of negotiations with Israel.
Because Mr. Abbas is a proponent of diplomacy instead of violence, his political fortune is in large degree tied to Obama’s ability to push Israel to ease restrictions on movement in the West Bank, allow goods into the Gaza Strip, and restart a credible negotiations process.
But wait. There’s even more propaganda: The taming of Hamas.
Even Hamas is sounding politely upbeat. An aide to Hamas’s Gaza leader, Ismail Haniyeh, said that the Islamic militants seek to foster good relations with the West, including the US, which lists the group as a terrorist organization.
“We have no other choice,” said the aide, Ahmed Yousef, addressing the Ramallah gathering by video link. “We hope that the new administration will take a more balanced approach in solving the conflict.”
Funny, that’s not what Hamas’ spokesman is telling the rest of the media:
Meanwhile, Islamic Hamas movement, bitter rival of Abbas, said the meeting between Abbas and Obama was disappointing and did not bring any new thing.
Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said his movement saw Abbas’s commitment to the Road Map as “an uprooting of the resistance and a liquidation of Hamas” as the plan calls on the PNA to dismantle the armed Palestinian groups.
“All the Palestinian factions rejected the Road Map except Abbas,” Barhoum said, adding that Obama’s statements were “insufficient wishes that are no longer useful under the Zionist increasing military escalation.”
Hamas wants Abbas to halt peace negotiations with Israel, and to adopt armed resistance against Israel to pressurize the Jewish state into giving the Palestinians their legitimate rights back.
It makes you wonder how blind these so-called Mideast experts truly are, that they can’t even keep up with other news organizations’ reporting of the same topic. But of course, it isn’t blindness. It’s deliberate obfuscation because the above quote doesn’t fit Mitnick’s—and the Christian Science Monitor’s—narrative. That narrative, of course, is that it’s not Palestinian terrorism, anti-Israel (and anti-Jewish) incitement, and the refusal to compromise that is responsible for the lack of peace. No. It’s Israel in general, and settlements in particular.
You really have to wonder what the CSM’s problem is. As for Josh Mitnick, well—I’m guessing he’s one of Snoopy’s AssaJews.