Western States Overlooked Arab Tyranny on account of Their Own Israelophobia

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools

Lee Smith does it again. He wrote a perceptive, excellent analysis of the Arab Spring revolts, their connection to Israel or lack of same, the reason for the latest terrorist attacks on Israel [including rocket attacks], and the failure of US and other Western policymakers to foresee what was coming or to understand it.

Here are some excerpts:
Regarding the rockets attacks on Israel from Gaza and the terrorist bombing in Jerusalem [to which I would add the recent massacre of five members of the Fogel family in Itamar], Smith writes that the recent revolts against Arab regimes from Tunis to Yemen to Syria [among the most notable] occurred:

without the slightest apparent connection to popular outrage against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians . . . .

That these revolts were motivated by resentments against local, homegrown tyrants who oppressed and impoverished their own peoples while most of the rest of the world was growing more prosperous:

should be surprising to most experts and politicians in the West. For over four decades, the driving idea behind the West’s approach to the Middle East has been the supposed centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to Arab popular anger at the West and its key to ensuring the stability of the West’s favored regimes. That the price tag for this American diplomatic instrument has been thousands of dead Jews and several lost generations of Arabs has, in the upside-down world of Mideast policymakers, made the achievement of an ever-elusive peace deal seem all the more important with every passing year

That all that mattered to the Arabs generally was the alleged "plight of Palestinians" and "Israeli occupation",

was a convenient point of agreement between Washington policymakers and Arab regimes. For Washington, the peace process was a good source of photo ops and a chance to show concern for human rights in the region without interfering with the propensity of America’s Arab allies to torture and murder their political opponents. As for the regimes, they were happy to escape criticism of their own failures—rampant corruption, lack of basic human rights and freedoms, and violence against the Arabs they rule—by blaming Israel. . . .

By pushing the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past four decades, the West has helped to underwrite Arab repression at home. The rationale behind the emergency laws in places like Syria and Egypt (even now after Cairo’s “revolution”) is that because of the war with Israel, the Arab security states must be ever-vigilant and therefore forbid their people from exercising basic rights like freedom of speech—or, in the words of Gamal Abdel Nasser, “no voice louder than the cry of battle”—diktats that they enforce through torture and murder.

In view of the Arab popular revolts,

the Israeli-Palestinian peace process isn’t even a convenient fiction by which Washington can make nice to the Arabs. Rather, it has been a recipe for failure on a grand scale—social, political, and economic—that has now been laid bare. While the Arab regimes are being held responsible for their failures by their fed-up populations, Washington seems to feel no need to hold itself accountable for the collapse of a set of enabling fictions that has greatly diminished our position in a region that is of crucial strategic importance for the United States both militarily and economically

In this context, who was behind the recent terrorist attacks on Israel:

So, who might have an interest in the sort of disruption and realignments the Jerusalem bus bombing has caused? Maybe it was the Syrians tapping a few of their Palestinian assets to heat things up in Israel. . . .
Or perhaps it was the Islamic Republic of Iran, attacking Israel through proxies. . . .

Bear in mind that

President Barack Obama failed to support the protesters who took to the streets for Iran’s Green Revolution in June 2009

Nor has Obama yet called for Assad to give up power, about three weeks after the Syrian protests began, although he called for Mubarak to give up just three days after the start of the mass protests in Cairo. How do we explain the discrepancies? Apparently, Obama and the rest of his crowd of policymakers in Washington like the Assad regime. Recall that Obama sent Zbig Brzezinski to Damascus to meet with Assad & Co. in February 2008, nine months before the presidential election. He wanted Assad to know that if Obama were elected president, Assad would have a friend in the White House.

Smith stresses the Washington obsession with the "peace process" which is strong enough to override common sense and overrule a proper concern for human rights and general decency in politics:

Whoever attacked Israel last week knows how the game works, too, and sure enough in short order the U.S. policy community jumped to attention. Instead of pushing to cut off the regime in Damascus as the Syrian people braved death to go the streets, American policymakers like Sen. John Kerry and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered their bona fides. “There is a different leader in Syria now,” Clinton said of the man believed responsible for ordering the murder of Hariri. “Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.” [that is, Junior Assad is a "reformer"] Never mind that her own State department says rather that Syria is a state sponsor of terror; Washington will do nothing to help the Syrians who’ve come out against their own government, because the U.S. president is going to make good on his word to engage dictators, no matter how many Arabs have to die as he proves his point.

In other words, Smith shows that Washington policy is less concerned with Arab welfare than with enforcing a humiliating, dangerous, likely genocidal, "peace process" on Israel. Smith also demolishes the "linkage" argument, that is, that everything happening in Arab politics is really caused by what Israel does or does not do. This argument supplies an excuse to always pressure Israel no matter what happens among the Arabs. In my opinion, some Western policymakers have been and still are ready to fight Israel to the last Arab. So obviously they couldn't understand why Arabs wouldn't share their obsession with Israel and their eagerness to fight Israel [through the instrumentality of the Arabs], despite the Arabs' own abysmal social & economic situation. This paragraph is my own and does not represent Lee Smith. I conclude that the "peace process" is in essence a Judeophobic endeavor unconnected to any real search for peace.

By the way, Smith provides some interesting info about Olmert's role in the "peace process" and his connection to Washington [here]