Wired Mesh

Oops

Mark Steyn on the growing, belated realization in Europe that tacitly supporting Palestinian anti-Semetic terror was an act not unlike suckling a wolverine:

But Saudi-Egyptian-Jordanian opportunism on Palestine has caught up with them: it's finally dawned on them that a strategy of consciously avoiding resolution of the "Palestinian question" has helped deliver Gaza, and Lebanon, and Syria, into the hands of a regime that's a far bigger threat to the Arab world than the Zionist Entity. Cairo and co grew so accustomed to whining about the Palestinian pseudocrisis decade in decade out that it never occurred to them that they might face a real crisis one day: a Middle East dominated by an apocalyptic Iran and its local enforcers, in which Arab self-rule turns out to have been a mere interlude between the Ottoman sultans and the eternal eclipse of a Persian nuclear umbrella. The Zionists got out of Gaza and it's now Talibanistan redux. The Zionists got out of Lebanon and the most powerful force in the country (with an ever growing demographic advantage) are Iran's Shia enforcers. There haven't been any Zionists anywhere near Damascus in 60 years and Syria is in effect Iran's first Sunni Arab prison bitch. For the other regimes in the region, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria are dead states that have risen as vampires.

Unfortunately, this isn't just bad news for Cairo. This is bad news for everybody. It's hard to keep abreast of the news coming out of the Middle East and not be reminded of the old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." If you're not terrified by now of what rough beast is slouching toward Tehran, you have not been paying attention. For the first time since Stalin, we're rapidly approaching a historical moment when crucial players on the world stage are literally crazy. Blood-guzzling, apocalypse-adoring nutjobs. Concessions are probably not going to work well.