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Location: Nashville, Tennessee, United States

2/28/2003

An Idea Whose Time Has Passed
Canadian commentator Mark Steyn on why Bush is right and the experts are wrong about the proper approach to ending the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians:

The argument of the wise old birds and the EU and the Arab League is that a resolution of the Palestinian question is the key to a stable Middle East - that somehow creating another backward repressive sewer state on a tiny sliver of the West Bank would transform the map from Algeria to Pakistan. Some of us think Brzezinski and Scowcroft are holding the plan upside down: Transforming the Middle East is the key to a resolution of the Palestinian question. Creating a functioning multi-ethnic confederation in Iraq is the first step. Regime change in Iran and Syria and dramatic reform in Saudi Arabia will come next. Removing the state sponsors of Palestinian terrorism, cutting off the suicide bombers from the Jew-killing bounty, isolating Hamas and Islamic Jihad as islands of depravity in a sea of liberty, ending the (at best lethargic, at worst complicit in terrorism) UN administration of the "refugee" "camps," all these are necessary -- not for a Palestinian state, but to wean the Palestinian people from their present dead-end death-cultism, without which weaning any new state is bound to fail. If the Palestinian people deserve liberty, why settle for Arafat?

Yes. But what does that have to do with Derby Line, Vermont and Stansted/Rock Island, Quebec? I'll let Steyn explain the connection.