Said: Thinking ahead

[Bradford DeLong]

>We have simply never learned the
>importance of systematically organising our political work in this country
>on a mass level, so that for instance the average American will not
>immediately think of "terrorism" when the word "Palestinian" is pronounced.
>That kind of work quite literally protects whatever gains we might have made
>through on-the-ground resistance to Israel's occupation.
>
>What has enabled Israel to deal with us with impunity, therefore, has been
>that we are unprotected by any body of opinion that would deter Sharon from
>practicing his war crimes and saying that what he has done is to fight
>terrorism. Given the immense diffusionary, insistent, and repetitive power
>of the images broadcast by CNN, for example, in which the phrase "suicide
>bomb" is numbingly repeated a hundred times an hour for the American
>consumer and tax-payer, it is the grossest negligence not to have had a team
>of people like Hanan Ashrawi, Leila Shahid, Ghassan Khatib, Afif Safie -- to
>mention just a few -- sitting in Washington ready to go on CNN or any of the
>other channels just to tell the Palestinian story, provide context and
>understanding, give us a moral and narrative presence with positive, rather
>than merely negative, value. We need a future leadership that understands
>this as one of the basic lessons of modern politics in an age of electronic
>communication. Not to have understood this is part of the tragedy of today...

Why isn't it the grossest negligence not to have disarmed Hamas and 
Al Aqsa? The pattern by which the average American immediately thinks 
of "'terrorism' when the word "Palestine' is pronounced" was set at 
the Munich Olympics, after all...

Brad DeLong