The brouhaha over the Iraqi prime minister’s reaction to the Israel/Hezbollah war is of-course ridiculously disingenuous, at best. Al-Maliki has condemned Israel’s “hostile acts” and has pussy-footed about publicly putting the blame on Hezbollah. Anyone who acts surprised about this is illustrating a woeful and unforgivable ignorance about realities in the Middle East, and should really, at the very least, be laughed into a permanent silence (not that that will happen). Here’s a quick course in life on the street in the Middle East: the Arabs hate the Jews. Got that? They really, really hate Jews. Even more than Pat Buchanan does! Their religion tells them that Jews are descended from pigs and monkeys, and their teachers and leaders have told them since time immemorial that all of their problems are caused by — you got it — the Jews.

This is a problem (for the benefit of those out there, like Harry Reid, who are just getting used to this idea). In particular, it’s a problem for Israel, because it’s a Jewish country surrounded by people who hate Jews. It’s also a problem for the United States, not least in trying to push the Middle East into a future of relative democracy and peace. At some point, people need to be confronted and held to account for their persistent racist hatreds. Nevertheless, if we’re not yet holding the Saudis (and the rest of the oil-rich dictatorships) to account for their Jew-hatred, why in hell would we want to start by holding the first democratically elected prime minister of Iraq to account for it? Al-Maliki has one job, as far as the United States is concerned: SURVIVE! That is, he needs to survive, and the Iraqi government needs to survive, and democracy in Iraq needs to survive. To do that, al-Maliki needs to beat the terrorists and the sectarian death-squads, and to do that he needs to have and to retain the confidence of a critical mass of the Iraqi people.

Anyone who thinks that al-Maliki or anyone else would survive for five minutes in that country while waving an Israeli flag should please stand up so that the laughing can start. Reality isn’t what you want it to be. It is what it is, and you either deal with it or delude yourself. There’s plenty of delusion going around, even, obviously, in the halls of congress today.

There will be a time to pressure the government of a free Iraq to recognize Israel, open up diplomatic relations with Israel and trade with Israel. That time is self-evidently not now. Disagree with al-Maliki’s expressed point of view, by all means — but as for boycotting him, or trying to portray him as an enemy of the United States, that is just absurd, and says more about the wilful ignorance of those doing it than about their high principles.

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