On TV Tonight
Was at this speaker tonight at school named -----, a former PLO member, turned Christian, pro-Israel speaker. He was great. He gave many first hand accounts about what's going on in the Middle East, particularly in Palestine. It sounds terrible. Torture and beatings and huge anti-semitism. He was converted when he came to the US, to train as a Jihadi in Chicago during the 1980s. He was training to commit terrorist acts in the US way back then - this is the precurser to 9/11. This shit has been building, my friends. In any case, he turned around, converted to Christianity and now speaks widely in the US.
After the talk was over a newscrew interviewed him to get his reaction to Arafat's death. Then they started interviewing students and I volunteered, saying more or less what I said on my blog....That Arafat should be credited for bringing the Palestinian cause to the world stage, but that as a leader, he failed his own people and the people of Israel and caused a lot of hurt and heartache. His death, while sad because it is another human being, may offer hope to the people of both sides to come to some type of long term peace agreement.
UPDATE: I was cut from the TV program, but the guy was on it, as were other people they interviewed around me. Too bad. I liked what I said. I guess it didn't fit into their story.
1 comment:
Noted. And I was glad I wasn't sitting next to you, because each time he said this was like the Nazi's, I could anticipate a poking.
I will say this - the Nazi reference is the quick and easy reference to get an emotional response from any Western audience and although I liked the speaker, he was going for an emotional effect - not an intellectual one.
Let me say this about the Holocaust: It was the biggest tragedy of the 20th century. It also has been the most widely publicized and studied historical topic of the 20th century. Any sort of retrospective of the Holocaust gets an easy slot on TV.
In the 20th century, large atrocities have gone under promoted...the Armenian genocide by the Turks, the Rape of Nanjing by the Japanese in WWII against the Chinese, Saddam's massacres of the Kurds, Rwanda's tuti's and hutu's against each other, Bosnia, Pol Pot in the Cambodian Killing Fields, Pinochet's police state in Chile, what is happening in Sudan right now, Idi Amin in Uganda...really awful and terrible things, not done with quite the calculation and sophistication of the Holocaust, but in a way, equally appalling.
What is curious to me is why is the Holocaust the only one of these atrocities that is consistently referenced? Why is any atrocity linked to the Holocaust above and beyond any other of these atrocities?
Perhaps the link between radical Islam and the Nazi's is the anti-semetism...this argument is okay - but it focuses on the victims. Wouldn't a more accurate comparison be between the perpetrators? I don't have a better atrocity to reference, but I do question why are so many conditions and atrocities occurring in the world always compared to the Holocaust as the exemplar of all human evil?
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