Ehud Olmert, liberalized Likudnik

Ehud Olmert, now the Acting Prime Minister of Israel because of Sharon’s illness, gave a speech in New York last June about the wonderful, the miraculous, the world-changing, the human nature-changing Gaza disengagement, and Daniel Pipes quoted it and commented on it at the time, and it is must reading. (Thanks to Ruth King for sending.) Olmert said:

We will lead it [the disengagement] because it’s good for us. And we will lead it because it may do good to the Palestinians. And we believe that if it will be good for us and will be good for the Palestinians, then it will be good. It will bring more security, greater safety, much more prosperity, and a lot of joy for all the people that live in the Middle East. … Everything depends on the success of this disengagement.

All I can say is, what’s happened to “conservatives” in the U.S. has also happened to “conservatives” in Israel. They’ve turned into soft left-liberals who believe that if we just keep doing nice things for our enemies, all will be well. But it gets worse. Olmert continues, in what Pipes calls “the plaintive Song of Oslo that I never expected to hear from a leader of Likud”:

And we all desperately need it. We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want that we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies. We want them to be our friends, our partners, our good neighbors.

Unfortunately, in Olmert’s case, I’m not completely surprised by this astonishing public display of weakness and delusion. I never thought much of him after he let Ted Koppel slap him into silence with a cheap racism charge on the Charlie Rose program where they were guests together a few years back. Olmert, who was then the mayor of Jerusalem, said something like, “The Palestinians are not like us, they are willing to sacrifice their children, to commit mass murder,” and Koppel, in an unbearably superior tone, said something like, “Surely you’re not suggesting that the Palestinians are racially different from the rest of us?”, and Olmert said nothing in reply. He allowed Koppel to beat him. He let stand Koppel’s statement that to talk about the actual behavior and qualities of the Palestinians was racist. If a man won’t stand up to inferences of racism from Ted Koppel, what are the odds he’ll stand up against campaigns of terror by Muslim jihadists?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 06, 2006 09:04 AM | Send