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Friday, March 17, 2006

Is warning the "region will explode" a moderate position? 

With moderates like this, who needs extremists?

Jordan's King Abdullah II warned that a strike on Iran would cause the region 'to explode' and deplored Israel's raid on a Palestinian prison.(AFP/Yussef Alan)
And we don't want the region to explode, do we? No. Just one tiny part of it.

I really want to like the Jordanian king. Any Jordanian king. They have such nice English and they don't usually appear in military fatigues. They face a Palestinian demographic problem perhaps as profound as Israel's, if not more so. And they don't usually come right out and openly scream at us Zionists.

But, in the end, this celebratedly moderate king prefers that no one should so much as lift a finger to forestall Iran's explicit threats to wipe a neighbor from the map with a radioactive eraser. He seems to forget his little country is just downwind of us here in Israel, and close enough to be a likely victim of Iranian targeting error. I would have to guess the king has a very deep royal bunker, and a nice buffer zone of problematic Palestinians dwelling closest to Israel's border. That, and the courage of his moderate convictions.

I think it might be time to stop calling for the moderates to stand up; I'm starting to doubt whether they would really help that much. We've reached the point where the only thing that will help is radical Islamic peaceniks. Are there any, other than exiled apostates permanently living in fatwa-induced hiding under 24 hour protection?

If you really, really liked this -- or even really, really hated it -- there's lots more:
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