Pearls of wisdom from the empress of Annapolis

This item is a VFR perfect storm. A reader writes:

Rice repeated the segregation crap this week. From the Jerusalem Post:

She added, however, that as a black child in the South, forbidden to use certain water fountains and shunned from certain restaurants, she was also in a good position to understand the feelings of the Palestinians.

“I know what it is like to hear to that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian,” she said. “I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness.”

“There is pain on both sides,” Rice concluded. “This has gone on too long.”

She did precede this by saying bombing in Birmingham also helped her feel Israel pain.

But Rice was not the only female foreign minister in attendance making a complete fool of herself. There was also the ineffable Tzipi “Sniffly” Livni, sniffling this time over the Arab’s rejection of her:

“Stop treating me as a pariah,” Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told Arab delegates to the Annapolis conference on Tuesday, according to The Washington Post.

Livni and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke to the summit’s attendees in a closed-door session following the televised addresses by American, Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Many of these represented Arab nations that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel.

“Why doesn’t anyone want to shake my hand?” she asked in a dramatic address to the assembled representatives. “Why doesn’t anyone want to be seen speaking to me?”

Heck, I wouldn’t want to shake hands with this fool. Think of it, even as she’s complaining about the Arab leaders’ refusal to shake hands with herself, the foreign minister of Israel, a refusal which demonstrates the Arabs’ ongoing refusal to accept the existence of the Jewish state, her government has committed itself to reaching a final agreement (!!) with the Palestinians on a Palestinian state by the end of 2008.

To capture the utter folly of this “peace” conference, here is the rest of the Jerusalem Post article:

Dutch European Affairs Minister Frans Timmermans, who gave the paper details of the meeting, said the Arab delegates “shun her like she is Count Dracula’s younger sister.”

Livni had failed in attempts to set up meetings in Annapolis or Washington with colleagues from the Arab world, even though the summit was designed to show international support for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal had stated before the conference that he would not shake the hands of Israeli delegates, dismissing what he called theatric gestures.

Livni, who was interested in meeting some of the 15 representatives from the Arab and Muslim world at the conference who do not have ties with Israel, only held a meeting in Washington with Salaheddin al-Bashir, the Jordanian foreign minister whose country does have full diplomatic ties with Israel. That meeting took place Wednesday in Washington.

The Jerusalem Post has learned that there was also some pre-summit talk of Livni flying to one of the North African countries—Morocco or Tunisia—on her way home from Washington, but that this also failed to materialize.

Meanwhile, Rice, speaking after Livni, reflected on her childhood in the segregated South and said it allowed her to better understand both sides of the Israel Palestinian conflict.

Officials in the room at the time told The Washington Post that Rice spoke without notes, recalling “a time of separation and tension.”

She told delegates that when a local church was bombed by white separatists, four girls were killed, including one of her classmates.

“Like the Israelis, I know what it is like to go to sleep at night, not knowing if you will be bombed, of being afraid to be in your own neighborhood, of being afraid to go to your church,” she said.

She added, however, that as a black child in the South, forbidden to use certain water fountains and shunned from certain restaurants, she was also in a good position to understand the feelings of the Palestinians.

“I know what it is like to hear to that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian,” she said. “I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness.”

“There is pain on both sides,” Rice concluded. “This has gone on too long.”

Israeli officials interpreted Arab nations’ refusal to meet with its representatives as evidence that the Arab world had not changed its fundamental policy that there would be no warming of relations with Israel until after a deal, and that normalization was one of the Arab world’s major bargaining chips.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, likewise, did not hold any public meetings with any of the Arab representatives, and sufficed with pleasantries and handshakes with a few of them—the representatives from Qatar, Bahrain, Morocco and Pakistan—after delivering his speech Tuesday in Annapolis.

The Arab states present at the conference included Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

The Muslim states who participated were Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Turkey.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 29, 2007 12:35 PM | Send