The Post-Cairo Middle East

Well, all of Barack Obama's simpering appeasement to the Muslim and Arab world really paid off.

A couple of very recent incidents show just how successful talking to and trying to understand your opponents can be. Particularly when they are as tolerant and rational as many found in 'Palestine' and the wider Arab world.

Israel Matzav reports that on the 6th June, Arab journalists who had clearly absorbed Obama's message of peace and love refused to attend an interview because it would mean sitting next a Jewish Israeli:

Yediot Aharonot reports that after basking in the light of President Obama for an hour in Cairo on Thursday, two Arab journalists out of seven didn't show up for an interview with The One because an Israeli Jew (Nahum Barnea of Yediot) was also invited (translation from The Weekly Standard via Memeorandum).

After Obama’s speech yesterday at Cairo University, we gathered, six senior journalists from all over the Muslim world and I, the reporter for Yedioth Ahronoth, around a circular table in a side room. The president wanted to give us an interview.

The original group had eight. The Syrian did not show after hearing that a reporter from Israel had been invited. The Lebanese, Naoum Sarkis, had been sitting with us all at the front of the hall but when he realized where I was from and whom I was representing, he passed on the opportunity and fled.

If further proof were needed that a new era in Jewish-Arab relations beckons, today Arab militants launched an attempted terrorist attack on Israel from Gaza.

Around ten men fired upon the Israeli military, and four were killed when the Israelis returned fire. With them the terrorists had horses which had been booby-trapped with explosives.

It is believed that they were either trying to abduct Israeli soldiers or attack a nearby Israeli community.

As Israeli tanks and helicopters came to assist ground troops, mortar shells were fired from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to help the cell escape.

Aussie Dave over at Israelly Cool covers this story in more detail, but he also has some information on what became of 48 ambulances donated by other Arab states during January's conflict in Gaza:

“The [Palestinian] Health Ministry stated yesterday that Hamas militias had raided 46 ambulances, donated by Arab states during the recent aggression on the Gaza Strip, of the medical equipment that they contained… and used them as military vehicles to arrest civilians, after painting [the ambulances] black.

The Ministry’s director of public relations and information, Dr. Omar Nasr… said that the medical equipment removed from the ambulances was expensive. He demanded that the Hamas militias declare, courageously and openly, what had become of the thousands of tons of medical equipment which had been brought into the Gaza Strip as assistance for the Palestinian people, and which had passed at its [Hamas's] orders to private warehouses and its own medical centers, and was later sold to the helpless citizen…”

[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, May 20, 2009]

Seems that the peace plan is on track. Occidental Soapbox has a very good rebuttal to Obama's speech - well worth a watch. A transcript can be found at his blog.