Friday's Washington Post featured an encouraging headline:

Saudi Envoy Rejects Iranian's Comments on Holocaust

Unfortunately, that positive headline masked the vile sentiments of Saudi Arabia's new ambassador to the U.S. that are quite clear in the article:

"As far as Saudi Arabia is concerned, that's a historical fact, you cannot deny that, and people should move forward from that," Turki said.

The extermination of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II "of course has affected our part of the world because much of the European and American sympathy for the Zionist movement stemmed from that horrific genocide," Turki said. "The occupation of Palestine since then has been a consequence of that."

(The Arab/Muslim world holds a number of contradictory assessments about the Holocaust: it denies it, it claims that the Holocaust is the reason that Europeans were allowed to build a country in the Middle East, it claims that Israel now carries out a Holocaust against the Palestinians.)

You don't need to read that statement closely to realize that Prince Turki is denying Israel's right to exist. According to him the only reason that the world acted to create Israel was sympathy to the European Jews. The idea that there's any historical tie of Jews to Israel is absent.

A few weeks ago columnist Jackson Diehl, who has a soft spot for "reformers" in the Arab world regardless of their anti-Israel orientation wrote of President Mubarak's efforts to fix the most recent election in Egypt in "Mubarak outdoes himself":

What to do? First, President Bush should refuse to be spooked by Mubarak's would-be boogeyman. Though the Muslim Brotherhood is indeed fundamentalist, it renounced violence decades ago and has joined with secular opposition groups in calling for a genuine parliamentary democracy in Egypt. "[W]e are serious about pushing forward the process of reform, actualising democratic transformation and building a development renaissance on all fronts," said an essay published in Al Ahram last week by a senior Brotherhood figure, Essam Erian. That's an agenda the administration should be able to endorse -- and promote as an example for other Islamic movements in the Middle East.

And how would a Muslim brotherhood re-act towards Israel? Diehl won't address that. But perhaps this article sheds some light, "Egypt's Muslim Brothers brand Israel a 'cancer'":

The leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the country's largest opposition force, called Israel a "cancer" in the Middle East and said its peace treaty with Egypt should be submitted to a referendum.

"I declared that we will not recognize Israel which is an alien entity in the region. And we expect the demise of this cancer soon," Mohammed Mehdi Akef told the state-owned English language Ahram Weekly in an interview published Thursday.

Yikes, this guy's in agreement with Ahmadinejad and, thus, even more extreme than Saudi Arabia's ambassador here.

Then, recently, Syria banned Aaron Klien, a Jewish reporter from entering. And Michael Totten's photographer got hassled by Hezbollah on suspicion that he was Jewish.

And when you consider that the Arab world - not even unanimously - only grudgingly considers giving approval to afford an Israeli humaniatarian organization the same protections every other humanitarian organization has around the world, you realize that the Arab world, on the whole, hates Israel, and hasn't changed much since 1993. This isn't a matter of making anyone a caricature. It's a matter of looking seriously at their statements and actions and drawing the only conclusion possible. Peace will not come when the Palestinians get the land they are demanding but when these attitudes change.