The Dayton Force and More US Millions

Ethan Bronner in the New York Times deals yet again with the new Pal. messiah: its "security forces".

Messiah?

“These guys now feel like they’re on a winning team, that they are building a Palestinian state,” said Lt. Gen. Keith W. Dayton.

Rina Castelnuovo


I have dealt several times with this new American mantra of "security" (here I; here II; and here III). Condoleeza Rice was almost ecstatic over it. Most recently, Hillary Clinton's advisors inserted in her statement a reference to this element of the "peace".

It's quite simple:

The Americans train the Pals. on an 18-acre campus built with $10 million of American taxpayer money in the Jordan Valley desert near Jericho, along with a 35-acre, $11 million operations camp a few miles away with a National Security Force Operations Camp elsewhere in Jericho.
The Pals. are trained.
The Pals. fight terror.
The Pals. fight the Hamas and others.
The Pals. (and Americans) then apply pressure on Israel to withdraw, assuring Israel that all is dinkydory and that no rockets or missiles or even mortars will rain down on Israel from the Samarian Hills and Judean Foothills.

Here, from the Pal. mouth:

“We have been trained with American money and by General Dayton, and that means a lot to us,” said Brig. Gen. Munir al-Zoubi, commander of the 1,800-man Presidential Guard, the elite force that protects top officials and guests. “We are here to enforce law and order and to use all means to fight terrorism.”

He was asked whether the word “terrorism” was a delicate one.

“Two years ago, we couldn’t talk about or use the term ‘terrorism,’ ” he said. “Any Palestinian who used the term was called a collaborator. But that is no longer true. We have discovered that many people commit terrorist acts under the cover of resistance to occupation. And we are fighting that.”...General Zoubi added that his forces had been trained in human rights, at their request, and in how to shoot without killing when capturing an armed suspect. [that must have been hard]

Okay, you can stop laughing now, even you people in Sderot bomb shelters.

And how did Dayton come to this?

He said he first became aware of the importance of this conflict beyond its borders when he was leading weapons searches in Iraq in 2003. As he and his men entered barracks of the Iraqi Republican Guards, he kept seeing drawings on the walls showing Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, a sacred Muslim shrine, being strangled by a cobra symbolizing Israel.

I wonder if he gave any thought to the real meaning of those wall drawings.