Hope and Change, Middle East Edition

Just as the apotheosis of Obama means we're on the verge of economic recovery -- no matter what the unemployment rate -- it also means that peace is just around the corner:

The status of Jerusalem as the future capital of a Palestinian state is a red line that no Palestinian leader is permitted to cross, President Mahmoud Abbas' ruling Fatah faction declared in the West Bank on Saturday.
According to Israel Radio, the Fatah general conference, which convened in Bethlehem for a three-day gathering, adopted a position paper which also states that the Palestinian national enterprise will not reach fruition until all of Jerusalem, including the outlying villages, come under Palestinian sovereignty.
Fatah, which rules the West Bank but was ousted from power in Gaza by the Islamist Hamas movement, also ruled out any interim agreements with Israel.
"Fatah will continue to sacrifice victims until Jerusalem will be returned [to the Palestinians], clean of settlements and settlers," the paper states.

Via Memeorandum. At Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer says:

If Obama can force Israel to make enough concessions, they will surely end their jihad against the Jewish State -- won't they? All the learned analysts are just sure of it, so it must be so.

Right. One of the most stubborn follies of the past four decades -- and I'm old enough to have watched the 1967 Six-Day War on the 6 o'clock news -- is the bien-pensant notion that the essential problem in the Middle East is Israel.

There was a time when nearly all Democrats were staunchly pro-Israel, when even most liberals understood that Arab hatred of Israel was incited by the Soviets as part of a proxy campaign of Third World "wars of national liberation" against the West, and when most people could grasp the significance of the fact that Israel was attacked by enemies armed with MIGs and Kalishnikov assault rifles.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, people in the West seem to have forgotten that history. Now, the American foreign-policy establishment is dominated by alumni of elite "Middle East Studies" programs infested with the likes of Rashid Khalidi and Hamid Dabashi, the Columbia University heirs of Edward Said.

Therefore, "respectable" opinion about the Middle East now endorses the Fatah/Hamas/Hezbollah agenda, which can be summarized in two words: Kill Jews.

The successors of Yasser Arafat have their own American academic echo chamber, so that anyone who opposes their genocidal agenda is automatically accused by "learned analysts" of being an AIPAC stooge. And the Democratic Party is now controlled by what we might reasonably describe as the Sirhan Sirhan Caucus.