Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the police force of collaborating Palestinian gangsters paid by the US and Israel, has withdrawn his support for the effort to bring the Goldstone report before the UN Security Council (the report details the myriad crimes committed during the Israeli terrorist mass murder operation in Gaza last December).

Abbas already lacked any popular legitimacy, as he is an obvious quisling ass-sniffing corpse-eater. Still, this recent betrayal of the people of Gaza is threatening to turn his own collaborationist government against him. Even he must have known that this was making the order of things impossibly explicit. And yet he gave in to American and Israeli pressure to forget about Gaza.

My question is: what is the purpose of this pressure? What do the Americans think they're going to get by signing a forced "peace" deal with an utterly depraved and humiliated Palestinian "leadership" that they've bribed, beaten, and shat on for years? Does Obama actually think this will lead to peace? If he does, he's utterly stupid. If he doesn't, he is murderously cynical.

This grotesque charade of a "revived peace process" is of a piece with too many other Obama initiatives. It's not just too cautious. It is transparently false, and it is in fact worse than doing nothing. In this situation there are other ways of proceeding that are in fact more cautious.

I understand that under Obama at least Israel doesn't feel free to slaughter thousands of Palestinian civilians at a time. But this pathetic kabuki poses its own very serious problems. The issue is not Obama's cautiousness or his failure to pursue peace intensely enough. It's his willingness to try to conceal very serious and painful problems with a layer of sanctimonious bullshit. And this is not the only area in which he's proven willing to do this.