Rossputin.com Rational Thinking About Our World

PUBLISHED in the Boulder Daily Camera, 6/21/07
http://dailycamera.com/news/2007/jun/21/no-headline---21elet/

re " Israel, a failed state" (Opinion, Boulder Daily Camera, 6/16/07)
http://dailycamera.com/news/2007/jun/16/israel-a-failed-state/

Ida Audeh’s ridiculous views on Israel as “a failed state” would make me laugh due to its repeated truly idiotic statements if views like hers were not so dangerous and so prevalent on the left.

One reasonable measure of a country’s success is its financial markets; failed states are not conducive to entrepreneurship and the liberty necessary to create a vibrant economy. The current market cap (value of all shares) traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange is about $860 billion dollars. For comparison, the value of all Egyptian stocks is about 1/8th of that number and all Norwegian stocks are worth less than half that number. Even the value of the Swiss market is only about 15% higher than the value of Israeli stocks.

Can one imagine the Palestinians being able to stop murdering each other or attempting to murder Israelis long enough to build even one really successful company, one which would offer employment and a model of Palestinian success to their people?

UN resolutions are meaningless when they come from an organization which has turned into little more than an Israel-and-US-bashing club. Audeh’s reference to the many anti-Israel resolutions is like wondering why the world doesn’t pay more attention to anti-black resolutions of the KKK.

The idea that a successful liberal democracy, the only one in that entire part of the globe, has somehow failed, is ridiculous. What has failed is the attempt by Palestinians to claim any mantle of legitimacy when their only real goal is the elimination of Israel and their only tactics are terror and murder. The left’s blinkered hatred of Israel leads them to support some of the most truly evil forces on earth. We should not let people like Audeh go unchallenged as just simply having a different view any more than we let the KKK simply represent another equally valid alternative to modern political norms.