WHO'S GOING TO GIVE CREDIT WHERE DUE, WHEN DUE THOSE TWO?:

Peace with Israel? (David Warren, 12/18/04, Ottawa Citizen)

Perhaps the reason we are reading comparatively less about "Israel/Palestine" lately is that there is so much real news, and so much of it is astounding, and hopeful. The media are allergic to good news, and run from it as from holy water. The greatest single piece of good news was presented as if it were a tragedy -- Arafat is gone. As became immediately evident, he was blocking the only possible way forward to the "two-state solution" that all but the terrorists claim to support.

Abu Mazen -- whom we should really start calling by his real name, Mahmoud Abbas -- quickly emerged as Arafat's successor, without carnage, at least without much, and looks certain to win the January election [...]

Mr. Abbas's recent trip to Kuwait, in which he apologized on behalf of all Palestinians for the support Saddam Hussein had received from them, was the surest indication of a new Palestinian approach to survival. It was also an indirect acknowledgement of a new order of things in the Middle East: that the shift of Iraq from fair-weather friend of Jihadis, to mortal enemy, is likely to stick, with (mostly positive) repercussions across the region.

You can'tr really expect the press to acknowledge that George Bush and Ariel Sharon have solved the Palestine problem, can you?

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 18, 2004 4:03 PM