Can They Fix It? No They Can't!

If you're a person burdered by "the vision of the annointed" (Thomas Sowell's catch phrase for "tikkun olam"-ish Leftists, and not only the Jewish ones) you pretty much think your brains, innate virtuousness and stick-to-it-iveness can remedy the most intractable situation--that squabble between Jews and Arabs over land, say. The pseudonymous writer Spengler pillories these visionaries and their irrational blame game (hat tip--MK):

Spengler's corollary states: Neither is there peace to the stupid. We have Nicholas Kristof writing in the October 6 New York Times: "Now it is Israel that is endangered most by its leaders and maximalist stance. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is isolating his country, and, to be blunt, his hard line on settlements seems like a national suicide policy. Nothing is more corrosive than Israel’s growth of settlements because they erode hope of a peace agreement in the future."

Kristof is talking about the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, which was undeveloped land before 1967 and which every conceivable peace agreement would assign to Israel.

Nothing will appease the liberals, because if liberal social engineering can't fix the problems of the Middle East, the world will have no need of liberals. The New York Times will demand [14] that Israel concede and apologize, as surely as a gumball will roll out of the machine when I crank in a quarter. Existential need trumps rationality, most of all among the self-styled priesthood of rationality.

For extra credit, class: If 15 million Egyptians starve to death, and all the Copts are murdered, and Syria plunges into a genocidal civil war, and Turkey kills another 40,000 Kurds, and the Iraqi Shi'ites and Iraqi Sunnis all fight to the death, whose fault will it be?

I bet you guessed right this time. Israel's, for building apartments in Gilo.

'Twas ever thus. Back in the Middle Ages, they blamed the Jews for the Black Death.