My tax dollars pay for a lot of worthless things, but Washington has hit a new low. According to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Obama Administration has invested nearly $250,000 (paid for with United States taxes...of course) for the creation of billboards featuring Palestinian officials (including the faces of senior Palestinian Authority officials Saeb Erekat, Jibril Rajoub, Yasser Abed Rabo, and Riad Malki) that read, "We are partners...what about you?"
Seriously?
The American government is funding a Palestinian Authority campaign movement IN Israel?
Is this how you win a Nobel Peace Prize? Crap...I was waaay off.
Wow, if they have so little confidence in the sham "peace talks" that they're funding billboards to plead for support from the hardened Israeli masses the Obama admin should probably just back off this and use the time and political capital somewhere they think they can be effective.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea why presidents (Clinton at Camp David, Bush at Annapolis, and Obama now) think having the Palestinians and Israelis get together for totally unorganized, accountability-free negotiations is somehow going to help the problem. These administrations never actually have any real plan, it's just all smoke and mirrors and when the parties inevitably pack up their bags and return home, the US always asked like they tried their hardest and exhausted their options.
Now they're going to have peace talks about the very land that Israel continues to appropriate and colonize. Can't we get an injunction on settlement building while the talks are going on as spelled out and accepted by the Israelis in the 2003 Road Map?
For their part, the Palestinians already have too many "states" for a two-state solution (the West Bank and Gaza) and since nobody is allowed to even call Hamas up on the phone (except of course the Israelis, because when they talk to Hamas it's somehow ok) to get them involved in an issue that intimately concerns them. You don't make peace with your friends, you make it with your enemies and for this stuff to really work Hamas needs to be a part of the solution, or at least involved in a limited degree.
What a farce...