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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Noel de Leon who wrote (98831)	5/22/2003 6:15:39 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

For goodness sakes, anybody who believes that either side is credible is....(here one can insert one's favorite expletive). You don't quite get what I'm saying. Dennis Ross and Shlomo Ben Ami work in the Western world; they spin or lie in the manner of Western politicians, keeping an eye both on their political needs and their credibility, which generally means they tread a path between the unvarnished truth and a lie, let's call it the "varnished" truth. Arafat works in the Arab world, where face and honor and keeping loyalty with one's side is all, and truth is far too precious a commodity to be given away free to strangers. So Arafat says things that are not merely lies, but the Western ear, totally improbable and easily found out lies. For instance, "the Israelis massacred 5,000 civilians at Jenin" or "the Israelis shoot Palestinian youths to harvest their organs", both of which he has said. They were good pep talk lines at the time; that's all that mattered. Moreover, Arafat is totally untrustworthy even by the slippery standards of Arab politics. He has signed thousands of cease-fires and broken nearly all of them before the ink was dry. You don't have to ask the Israelis; ask the Lebanese or the Jordanians. The late King Hussein had the best line on Arafat, "Arafat never came to a bridge he couldn't double-cross."