Jaw-Jaw Junkies

What is it with leftists and their belief in "talk"? Take the Globe and Mail, for instance. Its editorial today demands that Israel "talk" to Hamas, even though, Hamas being Hamas, there's nothing to talk about. (In an astounding feat of understatement, the editorial describes the Hamas Charter--a document calling for nothing less than the obliteration of all Jewry--as "combative, angry and disturbing." Au contraire. The works of, say, Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein are "combative, angry and disturbing." The Hamas Charter, with its genocidal brio, its jihadist panache, makes Mein Kampf read like Dr. Seuss.) Nonetheless, the editorial wants Israel to put out unofficial feelers to the local chapter of the Muslim Bros--as it did to the PLO back in Oslo days:

The only way forward, for the time being, is to engage in informal, exploratory conversations, perhaps “below the radar.” A comparable process resulted in the Oslo Accords in 1992 and 1993 – which is not to say that Hamas now is simply equivalent to the Palestine Liberation Organization then. Likewise, communications similar to the Geneva Initiative of 2003 which resulted in the entirely hypothetical and unauthorized “Geneva Accord” – independent of any government – could be constructive in these circumstances.

Israel cannot yet negotiate with Hamas. But stony silence is not an option either. If they can talk about Gilad Shalit, they can put out some tentative feelers to each other on broader themes, too.

Cannot yet negotiate with Hamas. As if, at some unspecified point in the future, that will no longer be so? That's as demented (and in its own way, as full of Jew-hate, whether intentional or not) as saying to the Jews of Europe circa 1933 that you cannot yet negotiate with the Nazis. Six million murders later, there was still no negotiation.

Capiche, "talk"-bestotted Globe opiner?

As for citing Oslo and Geneva as examples of a way forward, given how well they both worked out, especially for Israel, "stony silence" works for me.