The United States media have no trouble seeing the point of view of avowed terrorists (or people who "take the Black September road rather than the Ghandi road"). Jamie Rubin and Madeleine Albright are great friends with Hashim "the Snake" Thaqi, former head of the terrorist KLA which tortures and kidnaps elderly Serbs as a policy. The KLA is now funded by the UN and NATO. The media have no time to cover Albanian terrorism, but endless fascination with Serbian atrocities. Kosovo Albanians are an "oppressed people" not "fanatical terrorists" like the Palestinians.
Or how about the Contras? If mass murder and mutilation disqualify movements from elite US sympathy, it's hard to see how the Contras managed to stay so well-funded by the USA and so admired by much of the mainstream media, including paragons of liberal enlightenment like the New York Times' Abe Rosenthal.
I too would like to see the Palestinians choose mass civil disobediance rather than war. But damn, it's hard to think of any people in the world that has been so throroughly and deliberately screwed by America. It's as if Iraq not only invaded Kuwait but ethnically cleansed its population into Saudi Arabia, then invaded the part of Saudi where the Kuwaiti refugees lived and after 30 years of occupation declared that it would generously allow some limited autonomy for the Kuwaiti refugees, surrounded and encircled by Iraqi soldiers, checkpoints and illegal Iraqi settlements. And that's called the peace process. And the UNSC condemns it, and the whole world is against it, but Iraq gets away with it because the world's hulking thug, America, lets it happen.
Seth
> ----------
> From: Brad DeLong[SMTP:delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU]
> Reply To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Sent: Friday, October 13, 2000 6:30 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: Re: Said on American Zionism
>
> >And if there had been an interview the questions to me would have
> >been adversarial, hectoring, insulting, such as, why have you been
> >involved in terrorism, why will you not recognize Israel, why was
> >Hajj Amin a Nazi, and so on...
>
> These *do* seem like interesting questions. Why was Hajj Amin a Nazi?
> Why did Arafat's organization decide that killing olympic athletes
> was a peachy-keen thing to do? Why the prolonged refusal to recognize
> Israel?
>
> Does anyone know the answers?
>
>
> >What I shall discuss in my next article is how the only possible
> >political strategy for the US so far as Arab and Palestinian policy
> >are concerned is neither a pact with the Zionists here nor one with
> >US policy, but a mobilized mass campaign directed at the American
> >population on behalf of Palestinian human, civil and political
> >rights. All other arrangements, whether Oslo or Camp David, are
> >doomed to failure because, put simply, the official discourse is
> >totally dominated by Zionism and, except for a few individual
> >exceptions, no alternatives to it exist...
>
> In large part because the image of Palestinians in the mind of
> America's necktie-wearing class is of the people who rolled people in
> wheelchairs into the ocean and started hijacking airplanes--thus
> leading to our current air travel ritual passages through the metal
> detectors and the x-ray machines. Wasn't the decision to take the
> Black September road (as opposed to, say, the Gandhi road) a decisive
> political error on Arafat's part? Is there any way it can be repaired?
>
>
> Brad DeLong
>