Academics, for many years, have foisted on foreign policy makers the doctrine of “conflict resolution.”

What makes these academics believe that conflicts between liberal democracies and Islamic dictatorships, including the Palestinian Authority, are resolvable?

It was this counter-intuitive assumption (or wishful thinking) that triggered the negotiations culminating in the Israel-PLO Agreement of 1993; and it continues unabated to this day despite the fact that PLO terrorists have murdered and maimed 15,000 Jewish men, women, and children.

Academics and their obsession with “good people”

DAVOS/SWITZERLAND,28JAN01 – Minister of Regional Cooperation of Israel Shimon Peres (L) and President of the Palestinian Authority Yasser Arafat (R) attend a session entitled ‘From Peacemaking to Peacebuilding’ at the Annual Meeting 2001 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, January 28, 2001. Photo: Remy Steinegger, World Economic Forum, 2001. CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic License.

Evident here is a fixation (or mental disorder) which the present writer finds almost incomprehensible.  (See my Demophrenia: Israel and the Malaise of Democracy (Prescott Press, 1994.)

As a political scientist who grew up in Brooklyn, and who, as a boy, had to bloody some noses to minimize the number of times his own was bloodied, it has become obvious to me that the academics in question (let’s call these anemic academics “acanemics”) are fools who must have grown up in more or less homogeneous neighborhoods of well-mannered kids who exemplify Rousseau’s charming idea that human nature is benevolent.

This idea was adopted by Karl Marx. He maintained that human conflict is ultimately the result of economic privation and therefore can be eliminated by economic plenty. It follows that material goods trump religion, which, according to Marx, merely consists of “phantoms of the brain.”

From this a wag might conclude that religion is obsolete and that policemen are not needed to maintain law and order.

Meet the real world!

However, having grown up in New York and warned not to take a date into Central Park at night, it was obvious to me that a lot of dangerous nonsense was being propagated by acanemics.

After all, since conflict was not uncommon among Americans who spoke the same language, lived under the same government, went to the same public schools where the Judeo-Christian ethos of human dignity was entrenched, imagine how much turmoil exists in the world at large, in which western nations have engaged in more than a thousand wars in the last two thousand years.

Nevertheless, the academic doctrine of conflict resolution thrives. Most unusual are the number of Jewish acanemics that purvey this doctrine, as if their intellects were impervious to the tortured history of the Jewish people.

In fact, Jews in Israel have a talent for ignoring the lessons of history, and they moreover exhibit abysmal ignorance of Islamic theology. They cavalierly dismiss the religious imperatives that Islam imposes on Muslims, including those dwelling among them. Muslims, men and women, knifing Jews, does not alter the milquetoast mentality of Israel’s political leaders, who lack the imagination, let alone the guts, to design and pursue a covert strategy by which to inject rivalry among the leaders of the Palestinian Authority partly by eliminating them, one-by-one.

In view of the preceding, why not foster conflict and “conflict resolution” among Israel’s enemies?