Groundhog Day

You remember the old movie starring Bill Murray. The past keeps repeating itself with only minor variations. Each time, the protagonist (Murray) tries to get it right, but each time he fails.

In a news release today, Reuters notes the latest of a continuing stream of stories highlighting Palestinian victimization theater:

Gaza's main power plant began shutting down on Sunday due to a fuel shortage caused by Israel's closure of the Hamas-controlled territory's borders, a move taken in response to Palestinian rocket attacks …

Kanaan Abeid, deputy chairman of the Palestinian Energy Authority in the Gaza Strip, said the power plant turned off one of its two turbines and the second would stop in the evening.

"There is no fuel coming in and we have no reserves," Abeid said. He estimated as many as one million Gaza residents would be affected by the full shutdown.

Palestinian militants have been firing rockets daily into Israel from the Gaza Strip, which Hamas Islamists seized in June after routing President Mahmoud Abbas's secular Fatah faction.

Israel has responded to the rockets with stepped up air strikes and ground incursions that have killed 39 Gazans, 18 of them Hamas militants, in the last week.

Sound vaguely familiar? The reporter, one Nidal al-Mughrabi, mentions the Hamas rocket attacks, an on-going act of war, as an afterthought, sort of an “oh, by the way” comment that hardly deserves to be mentioned.

And of course, the EU, the State Department and the standard collection of usual suspects with follow with condemnations suggesting that Israel’s “fuel reductions amount to illegal ‘collective punishment’ against largely aid-dependent Gaza.”

The subtext, of course, is that Israel must be measured in its response (Could you imagine our “measured” response in the US if hundreds of rockets were launched across the Mexican border every month?). Israel must find a way to mollify the Palestinians while the Palestinians act the victim, aided and abetted by Left-leaning MSM around the globe.

But, of course, there’s only one way to mollify the Arab nation—Israel must cease to exist. In a comment at the Belmont Club , Peter Grynch notes:

Land cannot possibly be the contentious issue as the Arab and Muslim states in the region already have 800 times as much territory as Israel. The Arabs have 50 times the population of Israel. The Arabs have all of the oil reserves of the region. They have 21 states of their own, all varying shades of police states. It's difficult to imagine how one more will bring peace to a region that has known some of the most devastating and costly wars of the last century.

No one talks about the staggering number of Arab Jewish refugees, as many as 1 million, who fled the Muslim world with little more than the clothes on their backs to reach the safety and security of the Jewish state in the last 50 years.

When they vote with their feet, Arabs seem to love Israel. They continue to choose it as a place to live over life in their native countries as they have for the last half-century.

But it’s Groundhog Day, and that means it’s all on the Israelis. Always has been, always will be. Condi’s latest peace initiative, same ol’ same ol’ — think: Venice, Madrid, Oslo, Camp David I, Camp David II, Taba, the Rogers plan, the Annan plan, the Reagan plan, the Tenet plan, the Saudi plan, the Mitchell report, the Geneva accord and the Road Map.

But by all means, let’s wring our hands for the poor Palestinians who latest attempt at victim’s theater will be widely reported with only a post script that mentions their continuing rocket attacks. After all, there's unquestionable equivalence between a lack of lighting and a rain of rockets, isn’t there?


Postscript: No posts for the next few days. Have to have microsurgery on my back. Be back (no pun intended) soon.