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Pastimes : AMAT Off-Topic Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: willcousa who wrote (649)	4/11/2002 10:12:52 AM
From: michael97123	Respond to of 786

WC, Other regimes have controlled arabs in earlier times. Force is understood over there. Guys like buchanan and jerome have an anti-jewish bias that comes from somewhere in their past. A catholic friend of mine says that buchanan bought into the religious teaching of the catholic church pertaining to jews in the 50s when he was schooled. Buchanan also seems to take delight in trying to point out what he believes to be dual loyalties of american jews and this is also fueled by his jews as liberals line. Much of this has to do with the fact that many jews were anti-vietnam war and anti-nixon and were comfortable enough in america to express their beliefs, yours truly among them. So he built an ideology around these views. What he forgets is that jews are much like the irish and love their adopted country USA while hoping and praying for their co-nationals in israel and ireland respectively. Also for the vast majority of anti-war folks in the sixties, it was the fact that we were pro-american that led us to oppose an unjust war or an unnecessary war. mike

To: willcousa who wrote (649)	4/11/2002 1:32:47 PM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 786

When at the University of chicago in their international relations dept i befriended another arab name masoud. After the 1967 war he spoke like his namesake. Years later i found out he had been assasinated by "radicals" for his views. Hope this guy has a better fate. THE MIDDLE EAST Palestinians Deserve Better Leaders Following Arafat is suicidal in more ways than one. BY TAREK E. MASOUD Thursday, April 11, 2002 12:01 a.m. Those of us who watched Palestinian kids throw stones at Israeli soldiers and tanks during the intifada of the late 1980s find it hard to reconcile those images of bravery and daring with the current wave of atrocities carried out in the name of Palestine. The stone-throwing youths of the first intifada made it easy for reasonable people (who always saw Yasser Arafat for the terrorist that he was) to get behind the Palestinian cause. Today, when Palestine has become synonymous with the murder of innocents, supporting the cause is not so easy. One constantly has to separate the justness of the cause from the injustice of the acts carried out in its name. It is a near-impossible feat of mental acrobatics. What disturbs me is the degree to which many supporters of Palestinian statehood do not even attempt it. They issue pro forma denunciations of suicide bombing, and then go on to offer justifications. The Palestinians, they tell us, are frustrated by their lack of freedom, by the erosion of the dignity by an Israel that places settlers on their land and soldiers outside their homes. They are a people with their backs against the wall. After 50 years of occupation, we are told, the Palestinians have thrown their hands in the air and declared, quite literally, Give me liberty or give me death. But of course, as Thomas Friedman and others have pointed out, the choice before the Palestinians is not between liberty and death. Israel's leaders long ago accepted the logic of a Palestinian state; they put forward proposals for what that state would look like, and they haggled with the Palestinians over these proposals. Whatever one wants to say about the quality of Israeli proposals or the personal commitment of Ariel Sharon to a Palestinian state--and I happen to think both were fairly low--surely the Palestinians were not in a hopeless situation, the kind of situation which, we are told, causes sane men and women to fall into murder and suicide? And, even if the situation were hopeless, if all the options were exhausted, is there ever a justification for the murder of innocent civilians? The philosopher Michael Walzer recently argued that those who claim to have tried everything before resorting to terror are lying to us and to themselves. He asks, "What exactly did they try when they were trying everything?" There's always something else you can do short of killing. But many of the most vocal supporters of the Palestinian cause would rather not address these moral issues. Instead they want only to criticize Ariel Sharon. Even if you cringe, as I do, at reports of mass arrests and the bulldozing of Palestinian homes, Mr. Sharon is right about one thing: There is no difference between the murder-suicides perpetrated in the name of Palestinian statehood and Osama bin Laden's attacks on American civilians. You cannot, as many pro-Palestinian groups in this country have done, denounce the latter and justify the former. Those who do invite us to question either the sincerity of their denunciations of Sept. 11 or their capacity for moral consistency. <<...>> I'm not sure where any of this leaves us. Even if the supporters of the Palestinian cause denounced suicide bombing just as vehemently as they do Mr. Sharon, we might be satisfied, but this would not stop the steady stream of volunteers for the grim work of Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. This is why I think President Bush has the right idea when he demands that Arafat condemn suicide bombing, and in Arabic. There may be little the isolated Palestinian strongman can do now to control the groups that carry out acts of terrorism. But he can tell his people that the path of murder is the path of doom, that it has only brought shame to the people of Palestine and done nothing to further their cause. Of course, we may be indulging in some wishful thinking. "General Yasser Arafat," as he called himself recently on CNN, is not likely to become a moral force. If he had any inclination to do the right thing, he would have reined in the terrorists long before Mr. Sharon was even elected. It is by now the received wisdom that Palestinians deserve better leaders. We are offered an example of the kind of leadership they need by the esteemed British historian Martin Gilbert. In 1948, the U.N. mediator in Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated by members of the Stern Gang, a Jewish militant group that included a future prime minister of Israel named Yitzhak Shamir. In the half century since then, Arabs have often pointed to the episode to justify their own acts of terror. But what Arabs seem to forget--and what Palestinians would do well to remember--is how David Ben-Gurion, the father of modern Israel, responded to that murder carried out in the name of the Jewish state. According to Mr. Gilbert, when Ben-Gurion learned of the assassination of Count Bernadotte, he thundered: "Arrest all Stern gang leaders. Surround all Stern bases. Confiscate all arms. Kill any who resist." Yes, the Palestinians deserve better leaders. What they deserve is a David Ben-Gurion. Mr. Masoud is a graduate student at Yale.