Quickies: Something To Cheer About

     The international political scene has been short of “Hip hip, hooray!” moments in recent years. It appears one has just been delivered:

     DAVOS, Switzerland — In unscripted remarks to the press on Thursday, US President Donald Trump said the US would no longer transfer monetary aid to the Palestinians unless they entered peace negotiations with Israel, and excoriated the Palestinian leadership’s reaction to his decision last month to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

     “That money is not going to them unless they sit down and negotiate peace, because I can tell you that Israel does want to make peace, and they’re going to have to want to make peace, too, or we’re going to have nothing to do with it any longer,” he said.

     Thank you, President Trump. (And thank You, God.)

     It’s a commonplace that Arab Muslims respect power and nothing else. We’ve tried to get them to like us – the besetting fault of Americans – by treating them as equal negotiating partners with Israel. For decades we’ve tried to pay them to like us, with generous “foreign aid” payments that have mostly gone to the bank accounts of Yassir Arafat and Mohammed Abbas. But Arab Muslims regard that sort of treatment as a sign of weakness, an indicator that they can press for more and get it.

     At last we have a president who gets it. He’s taken a firm line with them, one they can’t help but take seriously. Moreover, President Trump, who recognizes the moral inequality of the contending forces in that region, is likely to be contemplating harsher measures.

     The Palestinian irredentists were at the zenith of their negotiating power twenty years ago...and they blew it. They’ve lost a great part of their public respect since then. Only anti-Semites and the propagandists of the Islamic world would dare to claim otherwise.

     President Trump knows the score. He’s not likely to allow the Palestinians any latitude for mischief...as long as he’s operating from his own convictions. Whether the coterie of Deep State globalists, Palestinian sympathizers, Muslim mouthpieces, and State Department careerists he must fend off can drag him away from his eminently sensible position, we must wait and see.