The West is Losing Because It Thinks Itself The Enemy By Prof. Barry Rubin

Why is the West losing the battle against radical Islamist and other forces in the Middle East? Simple, because it has people like Alvaro de Soto running things. De Soto, if you hadn’t notices, was a veteran UN official whose last job was as the organization’s top Middle East envoy. De Soto wrote a 52-page secret report on retiring and, duly leaked, it now explains to us that the fault for Hamas’s victory in the Gaza Strip—and no doubt just about everything else in the region—lies with the United States and Israel. It is people like de Soto--dare I say over-dressed, over-paid ignoramuses?—who had no idea what they are doing and no understanding of who they are dealing with.

And of course his arguments are published prominently in the mainstream media thus poisoning yet more minds, published for example uncritically in the June 14 Washington Post for an audience ready to believe anything bad about the current administration.

What does de Soto say? That the UN, United States, and Israel “radicalized” Hamas by trying to isolate it. This, de Soto explains, “hampered” peace efforts.

Let us summarize. According to de Soto:

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