Either Al-Jazeera Is Nuts Or The World It Covers Is Nuts. Maybe Both.

Marty Peretz
The New Republic
23 December 09

There is cultural malady among the Arabs. It is feverish, spasmodic, contagious. You can see it in the rhetoric in Arab politics. You can see it in the mayhem which easily flows from that rhetoric. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) records almost all of it.

Alas, for those of you who believe that peace will come easily to the Shi'a and the Sunni, to the Israelis and the Palestinians, to the royals and the military republics, the evidence is that it won't come easily at all. In fact, the evidence it that it simply won't come.

Western diplomacy assumes that political arrangements can be made for borders, for designated air space, for rules of disengagement and demilitarization, for political modalities. I think it is all a fraud.

Below is the transcript of a debate on Arab universities, carried by Al-Jazeera. It is an important topic. But the debaters are more than a little bit off their rockers, even the sane one.

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