My small Experience with Arab Relations and Negotiations By Jack Kemp I'm no professional diplomat or historian, by any means. But it seems to me, speaking as a regular guy who has traveled a bit, that the reason there is so much unrest in Iraq and in the West Bank is not because of the United States or Israel giving the Islamists any bad deal. The unrest is precisely because they did give the Islamists a good, fair deal - and the Islamists despise them for not being strong enough to finish them and also for not seeing through the obvious lies of the Oslo Peace Accords, the "Roadmap," various ceasefire deals in Faluja and elsewhere in Iraq. I now want to retell a true incident that happened to me college in the fall of 1967. My roommate was friends with an Arab exchange student from one of his classes who was supposedly the son of a former Jordanian high official. He was a skinny, short guy who appeared to be around 24 years old. I used to talk with him a bit and he knew I was Jewish. One time I even gave him a ride in my old car. He was full of advice on how to pick up girls: I believe that was his undeclared major. Anyway, coming back to school in the fall of 1967, one day, just after his country had lost the West Bank and half of Jerusalem in the Six Day War, I saw him walking towards me on a narrow campus sidewalk. I thought it best to not gloat about Israel's victory, which I had no part in - just smile, say "hello," and keep walking. But as I approached him, he veered into my path. I went right, he went right. I went left, he went left. Now. once again, this fellow was about half a head shorter than myself and very skinny. I found myself getting into a game of who could push who off the sidewalk into the gutter. I hadn't played this game since I was perhaps six years old, or maybe eleven at the oldest. And he played it grimly, not saying a word that even in those days would get him accused of prejudice (the term used before "hate crime" or "hate act" became popular). Not speaking myself, I then easily pushed this "defender of Jordanian pride" into the gutter, but leaving him in a standing upright position. That ended our "peace talks" about the Middle East situation and I walked on, never to see him again. Maybe he's driving a cab at the Minneapolis Airport these days. Or writing textbooks that teach Arab children to hate and kill Jews back in Jordan. I don't know. But what I do know is that his mentality of hatred couldn't stop him from making a fool of himself with an empty gesture on a sidewalk at an American university. Perhaps if he somehow could have pushed a much larger Jew into the gutter, that would make up for the loss of Nablus, Jenin, East Jerusalem, Gaza, whatever. I believe psychologists call this - when they see it in small children - "magic thinking." It is the basis of the nursery rhyme "step on a crack, break your mother's back." I believe that this type of Islamist "magic thinking" drives their behaviors all over the world and the only way to disabuse them of this is to prove them wrong - often by force. If the rest of us do not want to face this reality, then we are the ones, like James Baker, who are guilty of magic thinking.