True. But, over the last 2 decades, as I've listened to and read, advocates, activists and academics, from all the various politico-ideological "camps" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I've become much more critical of leftists here or in Europe who, I think and feel, offer simplistic analyses w/ no or little realism about the actual history and trajectory of the armed factions and orgs, or the underlying reactionary ideologies which promise only to reinforce patriarchal and authoritarian religious and familial dynamics, in any forthcoming Palestinian State. The participation of women in the Salvadorean and Nicaraguan armed struggles or in some of the African NLF's of the 70's and regimes like Mozambique, linked socialist and feminist ideas. I see very little of that in the discourse in Palestine or in the circles here that put out statemnents like this against the Geneva Accords, http://www.internationalanswer.org/news/update/120503geneva.html
Doug>...What's the point of this sort of thing, Michael? No one's ever claimed Assad's regime was admirable. It's usually invoked as some sort of back-door apologetics for Israeli policy. I might remind you that, unlike Syria, Israel does its violent work with U.S. arms, money, and support.
As if I could forget that ;-) (See today's NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/arts/10MAMD.html , "When U.S. Aided Insurgents, Did It Breed Future Terrorists?", on M. Mamdani's forthcoming book on the Reaganite arming and funding of the rapacious RENAMO (should get around to reading William Finnegan's book on Mozambique and RENAMO) and UNITA as counter-revo proxies.) But, it isn't always so easy to say, "No one here defends tyrant X, " when one deals w/ those M-L realpolitikers who have in the past have been upfront about supporting regimes and movements like Assad's (wade through the archives of leftist_trainspotters at yahoogroups.com which has a few hundred maoists, stalinists and trotskyists who routinely excuse or validate breaking those eggs to make that omelette that always ends up giving a "left" cover to the same old Somoza style brutality.
Michael Pugliese