Scapegoating Israel: It's Easy and Absurd

Just earlier this week, Iranian President Mahmoud Amhadinejad announced that the United States and Israel would attack two countries in the Middle East. Charles Krauthammer suggests he has in mind Lebanon and Syria.

That Middle Eastern autocrats focus myopically on alleged Israeli rabble-rousing is not surprising. What may be more surprising is how many Western leaders – from Vice President Biden to NSA chief Jim Jones – believe that Israel and the perpetually stalled peace process are to blame for much of the present difficulties in the region. This perspective is known as “linkage theory” and New Republic contributor editor Jamie Kirchick takes it down in his latest essay released this week in World Affairs entitled “The Broken Link.”

He exposes the fact that blaming Israel is a convenient excuse to avoid confronting the unpleasant reality that peace will never come easily. Kirchick also argues that Arab leaders use Palestinians and elements of the conflict merely for political gain, with no real desire to actually help the Palestinian people. Their real goal is simply to stir up an even deeper hatred for Israel and the West.

An excerpt (the full article is here):

Why is it that Israeli apartment construction in East Jerusalem, and not, say, the mass killing of Muslims in Sudan, stirs the hearts of the Arab world? One would have been hard-pressed to find much substantive coverage of that genocide in the Arab media, which is busy directing the attention of Arabs to the many small ways in which “crusader Zionists” and their American allies oppress Muslims. The reason for the double standard can probably be found in the fact that the perpetrators of the Sudanese genocide were themselves Muslim (and Arab), and their victims black. … Let the Arab and Muslim world show some anger at the vast array of human rights abuses committed by their own and against their own before we accept their mawkish claims of indignation on behalf of the Palestinians at face value.