Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki al-Faisal was in rare form yesterday.
Essentially, what he had to say was `give us the Jews and there will be peace'!
OK, he didn't put it quite that way, but his meaning was pretty clear.
According to him, it's all Israel's fault that US standing in the Middle East is at an all-time low and that can be helped only by pressing Israel to relinquish all occupied Arab land and Jerusalem to the Palestinians.
"We want you to remain friends with Israel," Saudi Ambassador Turki al-Faisal said during a question and answer session. "But that friendship should be used to push Israel" to relinquish the land the Arabs lost in the 1967 Six-Day War and provide the Palestinians with a state they have been denied for more than a half-century, the prince said.
Of course, the Palestinians and the intransience of the other Arab nations would have absolutely nothing to do with that denial, now would it?
"The United States is the only one that can deliver," the ambassador said. "The basic interest of the United States is for peace to reign in our part of the world."
In remarks he prepared for delivery to the National Council on US-Arab Relations, a private group of pro-Arab lobbyists, Prince Turki said, "It is no secret that US standing in the Middle East is at an all-time low."
(A note on NCUAR - it's classified as a 501c `charitable organization' by the Feds and gets major corporate funding from the oil companies and the Saudis.)
In the prepared text of his speech, distributed to reporters at the luncheon, he said, "It is not a matter of military strength or a shift in rhetoric, but rather a matter of basic understanding of the needs of the people who are affected by US political decisions."
He added, "If the US is going to help itself, its policy needs to change in the Middle East."
"No one has put his foot forward," the ambassador said in rejecting "excuses that won't do" such as waiting for Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, to actually control Palestinian terrorism and end the violence before launching negotiations.
Of course, Prince Turki wasn't really talking negotiations - he was pushing the Saudi peace plan, which calls for the Israelis to pull back to indefensible borders, give up half of Jerusalem, create Jewish refugees from areas in Judea and Samria that were actually purchased through the Jewish National Fund prior to 1948 and swamp what's left of Israel with millions of descendants of Palestinian `refugees.'
Want to really negotiate a just, lasting peace, Prince Turki? Try this on for size. Here's a real peace proposal for the Middle East
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