Wow, didn’t see that one coming!

Palestinian kills 4 Israelis on eve of peace talks - Yahoo! News

Palestinian gunmen open fire on an unarmed, civilian vehicle in the West Bank (Allah be praised). Four Israelis are killed (Allah be praised). Talk about déjà vu. The latest violence comes just as the United States launched a new round of peace talks between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Now that’s déjà vu all over again (sorry Yogi).

Violence on the eve of Middle East peace talks is about as difficult to see coming as a freight train on the Kansas prairie. It carries all the surprise of a stone sinking in still water or ice melting on a hot sidewalk. However, the Palestinian attack will shock someone. If it’s you, come forward and be recognized. It’s not everyday we have the opportunity to meet someone so amazed by normality.

A Hamas spokesman, quite predictably, praised the gunmen for their “heroic operation in Hebron,” for which Hamas has claimed credit. And Hamas didn’t celebrate their great victory over the dogs of Zion alone. Three thousand fellow Palestinian zealots rallied in Gaza to praise this courageous triumph (Allah be praised).

Heroism. Courage. I doubt that Hamas militants can as much as spell either word, much less define them.

Apologists will label this attack an isolated incident perpetrated by a radical fringe element. Yet Hamas and their allies are far from the fringe in Palestine. In fact, they’re as common to Gaza and the West Bank as are Southern Baptists to North Carolina. Would-be peace brokers, like Mahmoud Abbas, are the exception.

As for Abbas, he is fast becoming the “Uncle Tom” of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Factions within the PLO consider him weak and have threatened to depose him if he makes concessions to Israel. But how any rational Westerner has considered the PLO a peaceful group defies explanation.

In the years following the last “successful” Middle East peace agreement--the Declaration of Principles signed in Oslo in 1993--there have been at least 112 attacks carried out by various factions within the PLO. If Israel and the United States have a friend in the PLO, well, we’re up to our eyeballs in enemies.

The only people who can possibly claim shock at the deaths of four unarmed Israeli civilians at the hands of Palestinian cutthroats on the eve of peace talks are those who’ve had their heads buried in the Daily Kos.

Jews and Arabs have been at each others throats throughout their histories. A lasting peace between them is even less probable than between other colliding cultures and peoples. And when one side celebrates cowardly murderers as courageous heroes the chance for peace becomes as undesirable as it is unlikely.