European Blindness
Jeffrey Gedmin has a great piece in the Weekly Standard about European journalists and politicians hunkered down in Israel. He writes:

In Jerusalem, the King David Hotel has become, once again, a center of backroom kibitzing in a time of crisis. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman passes one way through the lobby; Israeli politician and former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, the other. E.U. foreign policy chief Javier Solana strolls down an adjacent hallway with former Mossad head Efraim Halevy. You have to wonder whether Halevy, a former ambassador to the E.U., can make any headway. In his recently published memoir, Man in the Shadows, Halevy says if you take European arguments to their logical conclusions, "then only the disappearance of the State of Israel would succeed in pacifying the insatiable desires of the Arab world." This may sound a touch extreme, but Solana lives up to the caricature. When asked by a television reporter whether the axis of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah has been behind the current conflict, Solana replies by saying that he does "not want to mention names." In another interview, Solana is pushed in vain to admit that Hezbollah belongs on the E.U.'s terrorist list.

It's really a good read.
- posted by Base10 @ 9:39 AM