Palestinian Unity Meetings Generally Brings Disunity!

Ne'eman discusses Fatah-Hamas effort to kiss and make up.

It has been my observation that when Palestinians come together seeking unity they are more likely to accomplish disunity and generally wind up killing each other.

This time it could be different because Palestinian statehood could be a unifying factor. That said Fatah and Hamas' philosophies are diametrically opposed and in the long run that could cause the disunity that has generally been the by product of Palestinian efforts at unity.(See 1 below.)
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Former Gov. Pataki and Steve Forbes share deep concerns about the nation's financial direction.

Political gridlock and extraordinary debt levels could easily become the cause of our economic ruin. (See 2 below.)
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Daniel Henninger is willing to bet that even Obama has been experienced a post graduate degree learning curve since becoming president.

The candidate is not always the same after entering the office sought because events and reality can be sobering. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)Fatah – Hamas Reconciliation?
By Yisrael Ne'eman

The Fatah-Hamas rapprochement announced in April is another attempt at unifying two major conflicting trends in the Arab/Muslim world. Fatah represents the national secular approach (anthrocentrism) to state building while Hamas as the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood views themselves as Allah's emissaries on earth and the guardians of the Divinely established religious order (diocentrism) of Islam. While professing mutual respect for each other, Muslim Brotherhood ideologues such as Sayyed Qutb consider national loyalties akin to paganism and while the Hamas Covenant expresses a certain respect for Palestinian nationalism it insists on a transformation to a strictly Islamic nationalism as one's true identity. Fatah/PLO's Palestine National Charter speaks of the Palestinian Arab People including Christians. In reality Hamas has taken on a secondary Palestinian Arab identity while Fatah through the Palestinian Authority (PA) supports Islamic content within the envisioned future state as expressed through the Palestinian Constitution.

Fatah, the PLO and the PA failed in Palestinian state building under Yasir Arafat's dictatorial semi-military rule. Only in the aftermath of the Hamas capture of Gaza in 2007 did Pres. Mahmoud Abbas appoint Salam Fayyad as PM and begin to build a national and administrative state structure following a Western recipe for security and economic development. Hamas power represents the successful rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. Immediately after a declarative "coming to terms" the two sides found themselves on opposite ends of the spectrum when the Americans killed Osama bin Laden, Fatah gave praise while Hamas sharply condemned the US action and heaped praise on Al Qaeda's leader.

Commentators, whether on AlJazeera (in English) or on Israel TV are speculating that the present unity may be a result of Hamas weakness, particularly due to the recent Syrian turmoil since their external headquarters are in Damascus. This is a short term disability of little significance when compared to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt which will prove much more of an asset to them in the long run, provided the present transitional regime in Cairo allows for their further strengthening. Estimates vary widely but the Brotherhood is expected to poll close to half the votes in the upcoming September election. It appears that the present uneasy attempt at cooperation between the Islamists and the former secular, military backed regime may prove more permanent after the elections. For both, this is the best guarantee against their common enemy - a truly liberal open democratic society as advocated by the younger, secular and more educated Facebook and Twitter generation.

On the political front, the empowerment of the Islamic movement is the most significant result of what is called "The Arab Awakening" or "Arab Spring". Hamas, fully aware of such developments will certainly move their offices to Cairo if deemed to their advantage. As opposed to the Mubarak regime, General Tantawi & Co. have announced the impending full opening of the border between Gaza and Sinai. While Hamas and Fatah are taking cues from the Egyptian example they do differ in one major respect - each controls a specific territory, Hamas rules in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank. Instead of a power sharing arrangement as in Egypt, Fatah and Hamas are in reality advocating a dual leadership to ensure they will receive international recognition for a Palestinian State.

The state will have two completely different cantons, Islamist in Gaza and Arab nationalist in the West Bank. The two can go through the motions of ruling one entity together but need not integrate as each has a territorial holding. Local leaders will determine everyday affairs. At the moment each side is guaranteeing the existence of its adversary provided the other side remains in its allotted territory. The integration of rule by Hamas and Fatah throughout all the Palestinian territories is unlikely as is a full election process allowing the Facebook/Twitter generation to participate and highlight their litany of complaints against both movements. Hamas and Fatah can cooperate, achieve statehood and avoid all major issues in the short term. Once the UN General Assembly vote is in, even without Western support the State of Palestine will be an internationally recognized entity. This is not the Security Council where the US or anyone else can cast a veto. The immediate objective is the solidification of a dual leadership accompanied by military dominance in each of the respective territories whereby neither can capture the other's canton. Such an arrangement could prove more durable than just a short term solution.

In the near future the two movements can be expected to work for an overall internal stability. Elections may be held in a year or so but a full Western style democratic process should not be expected, yet a certain democratic façade will be noticeable. At the moment Palestinians are focusing on establishing a state, not democracy. Upon achieving their goal Fatah and Hamas will be more capable of blocking Western interference in their affairs, together they will curtail demands for a full democratic system. A Fatah – Hamas clash in the foreseeable future should not be expected, both have too much to lose.

Remaining in power will be paramount for both while they use their new political – diplomatic tool of statehood to confront Israel. The Palestinian confrontation with Israel will certainly grab the spotlight away from any internal reforms, whether they be political, economic, social or of any other type.

(The next article will deal with Israeli policy in light of the expected establishment of a Palestinian State this September.)
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2)Forbes, Pataki Predict Economic Meltdow
By David Patten, Henry J. Reske, and Ashley Martella

As Congress and President Barack Obama continue to dither over the debt ceiling, conservatives ranging from former New York Gov. George Pataki to former GOP presidential candidate Steven Forbes, among others, are warning in increasingly shrill tones that America is running out of time to get its financial house in order.

“I think America is going to go the way of other great nations historically,” says author and syndicated columnist Walter E. Williams after carefully observing the political games being played over the deficit. “And that is down the tubes. That’s my prediction.”

Pataki, in an exclusive Newsmax.TV interview, says America is facing “an enormous crisis that looms above everything else.”

GOP budget guru Rep. Paul Ryan has warned that America is “on a path of economic ruin.”

And in an interview that Human Events published Wednesday, magazine publisher Forbes called for a return to the gold standard to shore up the dollar and stave off financial ruin.

“People know that something is wrong with the dollar,” said Forbes, who believes the gold standard would rein in federal spending. “You cannot trash your money without repercussions.”

One view all four of them share: America needs strong leadership to work its way out of a debt crisis that has led to $1 trillion annual deficits being projected through 2020. But they don’t see it coming from the White House.

“We now have $14.3 trillion of debt and under President Obama the debt has just increased the speed at which we’re racking up these unsustainable numbers,” Pataki warns. “This year, we’re looking at a $1.65 trillion deficit. Unprecedented.

“And yet when solutions are advanced, President Obama just ignores them or demonizes them,” he says. “And we can’t let him get away with this. We’re going to hold him accountable and we’re going to demand action to deal with the crisis right now,” he said.

Toward that end, Pataki created No American Debt, an organization he established to influence the presidential race in contested states such as Michigan, Florida, and Nevada, as well as early primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire. Pataki said he has more than $1 million in financial support for the group, and hopes to raise more than $10 million over the course of the campaign.

The effort echoes his previous campaign, Revere America, a group dedicated to fighting Obamacare. According to The Washington Post, the organization spent more than $2.5 million in the run-up to the 2010 election to support fiscally conservative candidates.

Pataki told Newsmax that Revere was involved in 88 house races, and won 44. And he’s just getting started with No American Debt.

“We’re going to be out there talking to the American people, we’re going to running ads holding the president accountable and we intend, as I did earlier with Obamacare, to get the American people to understand that the president can’t duck this, hide this issue, he has got to stand up and lay out what he is going to do today.”

Pataki said that, when he was governor, he cut state workforce by more than 15 percent, and a similar move on the federal level would save hundreds of billions of dollars. He also advocated shifting Medicaid to a state block grant program which he said would save 10 15 percent of costs, raising the retirement age to 69, and closing military bases. The United States has 153 military bases around the globe with 15 alone in Germany, holdovers from the long-gone Cold War, he said.

The U.S. debt crisis is so serious that Forbes predicts the nation will have no choice but to return to the gold standard in the next five years. So far, the only likely GOP presidential candidate endorsing that idea is libertarian-leaning GOP Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. But Forbes believes that will have to change.

“What seems astonishing today could become conventional wisdom in a short period of time,” he told Human Events.

How long does America have until the interest payments on its national credit card escalate to the point where it can no longer afford to provide basic services to its citizens?

“We might be near that point right now,” says Williams, the George Mason economist. “If debt continues to grow the way it has been growing for the last decade, a large percentage of the taxes we collect will be for paying interest on the debt. Interest on the debt will probably in a few years exceed the military expenditures, and other expenditures that we make.

“When that happens, we’re just going to collapse. That is, Congress is going to say: ‘Well look, we can’t pay the debt, forget about it, and default on the debt.’ That’s what countries do,” Williams says.

Experts say the United States already has to borrow about 40 cents for every dollar it spends. And ultimately, the blame for that lies not with politicians, but with the voters themselves.

“They elect them to office to take the property of one American, and bring it back to them,” Williams tells Newsmax. “Whether it’s in the form of Medicare, whether it’s in the form of prescription drugs, farm subsidies, food stamps, welfare, you name it. That’s what we’ve become: We’ve become a nation of thieves who use the government to take someone else’s property.”

Williams says at least two-thirds of the current activities of the federal government would have been “unthinkable” to the Founding Fathers, in terms of their understanding of the role of the federal government.
As recently as 1930, he states, it would have been beyond the pale to imagine the government would embark on the avalanche of bureaucratic programs that now are funded every day.

The one optimistic sign for Williams: The grass-roots conservative rebellion generally identified as the tea parties.

“That’s the only optimistic note I see on the horizon,” Williams tells Newsmax. “The problem is, I don’t know if it will be enough.”
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3)Killing bin Laden Barack Obama just got his post-doctoral degree in fighting the war on terror.
By DANIEL HENNINGER

Bin Laden in death has been remarkably disruptive of what people thought they knew. The bin Laden disruption arrives after other recent events that have piled in with such force and speed that knowing what to "think" about any of them invariably ends up an exercise half done.

The regime challenges coursing through 13 nations in the Middle East and North Africa disrupted everything we thought we knew about the region's famous "stability."

After Barack Obama followed the Brits and French into Libya, another disruptive phrase floated to the surface—"leading from behind." The idea that the U.S., after 70 years of global leadership, was content to fall in line behind France deserved a big discussion. That ended when a stunned world watched an earthquake and tsunami destroy much of northern Japan. The talk turned quickly to the future of nuclear power and safe energy sources. Perhaps someone somewhere is still thinking about it, because on Sunday, May 1, the global audience turned to hear President Obama announce that bin Laden was dead, gunned down by Navy SEALs. The disruptions came quickly.

Talk has begun already about seeing light at the end of the al Qaeda terror tunnel, and the French have opened the discussion about winding down the ground war in Afghanistan. Pakistan's status is in play. Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidates are rebooting their national security critiques of the man who but a month ago was leading America from behind.

Discontinuity may dominate how we live now, but what has been looping through my mind in the days since bin Laden was dropped overboard is one of the oldest ideas in the book: What goes around comes around.

Start with the spontaneous "USA" celebrations. Even as entire baseball stadiums erupted into patriotic chants, a dismayed dissent emerged to say the demonstrations were unseemly. Under the headline, "Bin Laden's death a tough subject for the pulpit," the Associated Press noted, "There is at least some dissonance between the values they [the clergy] preach and the triumphant response on the streets of New York and Washington to the death of a human being—even one responsible for thousands of killings in those areas and around the world."

It would be my guess that the divisions over the USA chants are roughly the same that occurred when the Bush administration introduced the USA Patriot Act. Notwithstanding that some anti-Bushies joined the chanters' amen chorus last week, or that Congress initially voted overwhelming support for the Patriot Act, it wasn't long before America went its separate ways in the war on terror—dividing those who like their patriotism boiling loud from those who in our time prefer it on a low simmer.

We know which of those two camps Barack Obama was in during his candidacy and after winning the White House. Which camp in what is manifestly the war on terror is the president in now? This may be the most disruptive political question to emerge from bin Laden's death.

Barack Obama will never be where George W. Bush was with the war on terror, but personally and psychologically, it's not likely he is the same man who in the campaign mocked the Patriot Act and the Bush antiterror policies (many of which he has continued).

A candidate is not a president. In the fall of 2008, after Mr. Obama won, our offices were visited by then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, a former anti-mob prosecutor. Asked about the Obama criticisms of the war on terror, Mr. Chertoff replied that it was impossible to overstate the sobering effect of learning the true magnitude of the threat and bearing responsibility for thwarting it. On another occasion, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who as a federal judge presided over terrorist trials in New York, was asked the difference between his understanding of terrorism then and as attorney general. "About the difference," he replied "between what you thought you knew in the sixth grade and a post-doctoral education."

Barack Obama just got his post-doc degree. Sitting in the White House Situation Room, he followed the fate of the SEALs he sent into Abbottabad to take down Osama bin Laden. Days later, he was at Ground Zero with the families bin Laden destroyed. Then came a long-overdue visit to the troops in Fort Campbell and a face-to-face with the soldiers who did what he asked them to do. No normal person could pass through this unchanged.

This does not mean we will be spared Mr. Obama's goofy campaign claims for replacing carbon energy with windmills and solar panels. His immigration speech in El Paso yesterday shows that the president is comfortable with ridicule as his primary political tone.

Killing bin Laden, though, is a different realm. Praising the president, Dick Cheney wisely said that in this battle a president has to build on the work of his predecessor. There is reason to hope that bin Laden's final disruption was to deepen seriousness about the U.S.'s most important mission in the one place it matters most. What goes around comes around.
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