>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...
-wow...am i on the right list? take everything i said about Friedman and -apply it to the great Bradford De Longs' gem here.
Brad's point is that the image of Palestinians as terrorists was one deliberately created by the Palestinians themselves-- in order to call attention to replace their image as inevitable victims who were destined to lose their land, how sad.
In fact, Palestinian terrorism was effective in capturing the attention and loyalty of many activists and nations around the world who adopted their cause. Whether a non-violent resistance strategy would have been more effective can be debated (and I think it would have been) but the Palestinians chose terrorism as a key tactic and it worked to a large extent.
In recent years, that older effective image purposefully cultivated by the Palestinians became less useful and folks like Arafat wanted to shed it-- notably just as Begin and Shamir and other terrorists who helped found Israel later wanted to shed their previously effective image as terrorists.
But there is a certain disingenuousness in complaining about an image of Palestinians as terrorists when the PLO spent decades purposefully building that image, even if they now in image and in practice wish a different one.
-- Nathan Newman