Diplomatic Slight of Hand

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By Rabbi Eli Teitelbaum

"Now you see it- now you don’t." Everyone enjoys watching a good magician making coins disappear, or changing white rabbits into black ones, even though we all know that it’s nothing but clever trickery and deception. The hand is quicker than the eye. Nothing really happened. Actually, politicians also enjoy playing the same game only they play it with words instead of coins or rabbits. While Uri Geller and his kind are busy bending metal spoons with their supposed psychic powers, politicians are busy bending words with their great powers of deception. They make believe that they are discarding one agreement and cleverly substitute it with a supposedly new and different one when in reality it’s actually the same old one just recycled. Freedom fighters or terrorists; it’s all a play on words. Arafat, bin Laden, Hussein, or Mazen - same terrorist just wearing a different mask.

Black sheep, striped sheep, spotted sheep - sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Lavan played the very same con game eons ago. What they say they don’t mean and what they mean they don’t say. The rules are that if you are caught telling the truth, then you are out. You lose! If you are a smooth enough liar, then you are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for your great ability at verbal deception and chicanery. Even Sharon is slowly learning how to play the game as he nods his head in agreement to whatever the US pressures him to say and continues to play the game by Arafat’s rules.

The better you are at the game, and the more people you are able to scam by making promises you have no intention of keeping, the more votes you get. Clinton was a master at the game and could easily have gone on for another term if only the law had permitted him to do so. Chamberlain claimed to bring "Peace in our time," yet all it brought was a World War. Abu Mazen’s definition of the word "peace" is that terrorists should lay low for awhile and use the time to regroup and rearm.

And so when the President and media hail "the great progress in the Middle East peace talks," we’d better try and define what that really means. Abu Shanab, spokesman for Hamas, a group that takes responsibility for several suicide bombings against Israelis, said, ''If the occupation stops, ( probably meaning - if the Israelis disappear into the sea ) the Palestinians are willing to live in peace and stop all kinds of violence.''

How hypocritical that instead of the US pressuring Israel to fight terrorism as it has itself done against bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein, it is instead asking Israel to surrender to Palestinian blackmail and extortion and reward terrorism with a state of their own that will only act as a lunching point to achieve their goal to chas v’shalom destroy the entire country. Past experience should already have taught us where all this diplomatic sleight of hand actually leads to. If we don’t know it as of yet, then we’d better get a brain tune-up or have our eyes and ears checked. Obviously our internal processor is on the blink or has crashed or perhaps we have just run out of memory or perhaps we have a severe case of SARS – Severe-Anti-Reality-Syndrome.