Pwnage

Christian Brose, at Shadow Government, shows us what a verbal bitch-slap looks like as he turns Stephen Walt’s devices against him:

Steve Walt asks what if the shoe were on the other foot in the Middle East – what if the Arabs had won the Six Day War, expelled most of the Jews, and allowed the Palestinians to set up a state of their own, leaving a million-plus stateless Jews holed up in Gaza, who then turn to Hamas-style violence. Would the United States consider them terrorists?

Well, for the sake of fairness, let’s play the thought experiment all the way through.

Imagine that, after pushing the Jews out of Israel, the new state of Palestine attempted to give the Jews a peaceful path toward a state of their own, with control over their own institutions of governance and security. (Stay with me here; as Walt says, this is a thought experiment.) Then imagine, to run the place, the Palestinians turn to a particularly odious Jew who made his bones killing Palestinian civilians. This leader of the Gaza Jews then promises U.S. and world leaders that he’s cracking down on those hardline Orthodox folks who Walt mentions. But what he’s really doing is telling them out the other side of his mouth that the final battle is near, smuggling in weapons, and encouraging the violent radicalization of the Jewish youth. . . .

And so it goes from there. Walt of course wants us to believe that identity politics exert more influence on our foreign policy than do the actual facts on the ground. Unfortunately this little thought [sic] experiment goes a long ways towards convincing me of the obverse.