Annapolis = 2/3 - x, What's Missing?

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By Djelloul (Del) Marbrook

After seven years of making matters worse by a bizarre combination of indifference and misdirected meddling the Bush Administration has finally convened Arabs and Jews at Annapolis, Maryland, and guess what's missing? What, not who.

The media are yakking about extremist Hamas and Iran not being there. Forget them, what's conspicuously absent is any acknowledgment that Christian and Jewish extremists have had a hand bringing the world to this awful pass. Muslim intransigence is one third of the equation, Christian and Jewish intransigence comprise the other two thirds.

But who is saying so? Certainly not us.

Report after report in recent days has speculated about the agendas of Hamas and Iran, but what about the agendas of extreme Zionists and their apocalypse-thirsty evangelical allies here who have pushed the conflict to the brink? Their polarized positions historically foreshadowed our own polarized politics.

I would say to the media what Senator Sam Ervin once said to Joseph McCarthy, Have you no decency?

How can there be discourse about this most vexatious cauldron of events without admitting that extremists among all three great religions involved have kept it boiling all these years? How can we go on taking part in this charade, acting as if only Muslim terrorists were the problem? How can we save ourselves from choking on our own hypocrisy?

Djelloul (Del) Marbrook was the editor of six daily newspapers and held editorial posts on several major metropolitan dailies. He is the winner of the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize of Kent State University whose press will publish his book, Far From Algiers, next fall. For more information www.djelloulmarbrook.com or www.myspace.com/delmarbrook.

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