Moral Inversion at Annapolis

May G-d and the Jewish people of Israel forgive me for having voted for George Bush. Via FrontPageMagazine:

“For too long, the people of Darfur have suffered at the hands of a government that is complicit in the bombing, murder, and rape of innocent civilians. My administration has called these actions by their rightful name: genocide.”

So said President Bush in a speech last May 29. At the end of the speech he said: “I call on President Bashir to stop his obstruction, and to allow the peacekeepers in, and to end the campaign of violence that continues to target innocent men, women and children. And I promise this to the people of Darfur: The United States will not avert our eyes from a crisis that challenges the conscience of the world.”

Just last November 1, in a message to Congress on the “Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Sudan,” he wrote: “Because the actions and policies of the Government of Sudan continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States, the national emergency [originally declared by President Clinton in 1997] must continue in effect beyond November 3, 2007.”

It was strange, then, to find in attendance at the Annapolis conference on Tuesday one John Ukec, ambassador to the U.S. from Sudan. In other words, among the invitees of a purported peace conference was a representative of a regime that the convener of the gathering himself, George Bush, had openly accused of genocide.

Sudan’s presence, though, wasn’t totally inappropriate to the morally upside-down world of the conference, which pitted a lone democracy, Israel, against the dictatorial-anarchic Palestinian Authority backed by a supporting cast of nine other Arab dictatorships of which Sudan was only the most egregious, along with the Arab League and the 56-member Organization of the Islamic Conference only a handful of whose countries could loosely qualify as democracies.

Moral inversion was well manifested in the Israeli-Palestinian “joint statement”—pursued like a sacred elixir for months by Secretary of State Rice and finally read out by Bush at the start of the conference—in which the sides “express our determination to . . . confront terrorism and incitement, whether committed by Palestinians or Israelis.”

With those words Israel—a democracy struggling against sixty years of violent aggression that does not engage in terrorism or incitement any more than Finland or Iceland—trashed its achievements, its identity, its Jewish heritage, and equated itself with one of the most terroristic and incitement-ridden societies of all time.