Ben Wedeman, CNN’s veteran Middle East correspondent, wrote an article on CNN’s website in which he places the blame for the Palestinian’s economic situation squarely on Israel’s shoulders. Wedeman does not blame Hamas, who took control by murdering Fatah supporters and who spend millions on weapons, or Fatah, whose leaders have embezzled billions of dollars meant for the Palestinian public.
Note to readers: Lazar initially put up this piece. My additional comments are in italics.
This is a perfect article for describing the Augean habits of the media, from the language used to the framing of the problem in which Palestinian behavior — against Israel or against their own people — doesn’t figure. Wedeman — against heavy competition — takes the Most Valuable Idiot of the Day award.
JERUSALEM (CNN) — Air Force One touched down in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. President Bush has come to the Holy Land for the first time as president of the United States.
But he’s trapped inside his security bubble, his every step mapped out in great and precise detail by teams of security experts and handlers. In the end he’ll see a side of this unhappy land that bears as much resemblance to reality as Hollywood does to real life.
I spend a lot of my time covering the West Bank and Gaza: here’s what I see, and he won’t.
He won’t be going to Gaza, the Palestinian territory that is under the rule of Hamas. Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States.
“Considered?” Have you read their charter? Are you aware that they openly espouse a genocidal agenda, and when they can, they act on it? What part of the definition of “terrorism” do they not conform to?
Gaza today is a wasteland. Since Hamas took power, the Israeli government has made it extremely difficult for Gazans to travel outside their crowded strip of land along the Mediterranean. Israel has also severely restricted imports in Gaza to essential humanitarian goods. Four out of every five Palestinians depend on international food aid, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. No one is starving, but the economy has come to a virtual standstill.
The Palestinian economy was growing only under Israeli control. Since the disengagement, the economy has spiraled downward. Perhaps Hamas should spend less money on amassing weapons, and more on feeding its people.
No one would have a clue from this formulation that the people in Gaza regret the Israeli departure. That might trouble his PCP approach in which Palestinian Suffering must be Israel’s fault.
President Bush won’t see the hospital wards where babies, just weeks old, are dying because their doctors can’t get permission from Israeli authorities to go to Israel for treatment as they did in the past.
Earlier this week, I visited the intensive care unit in Gaza’s Nasser Pediatric Hospital. Hospital director, Dr. Anwar Khalil, explained that a third of their incubators have broken down because of a lack of spare parts. The electricity goes out on a regular basis because the power is cut up to eight hours a day after Israel reduced fuel supplies.
Palestinians, even Gazans, still receive treatment in Israel. Israel is not responsible for their health, but still agrees to perform procedures that the Palestinian doctors lack the skill and equipment to perform. How perverse it is, that Israel is blamed for not providing enough free health care to citizens who voted Hamas in to power. Again, Dr. Khalil should ask Hamas why they have money for Katyushas, RPGs and mines, but not medical supplies. Perhaps he does ask himself that question, but wouldn’t dare voice such an opinion to a Western reporter.
When Israel left in 2005 they left clinics and hospitals with a full year’s supply of medication and equipment. Within a month they were gone — lost to looting, black market, corruption, incompetence. The technique of interviewing Palestinian sources and not checking is classic. That’s how the doctor in the Jenin hospital got away with claiming no food got through and the Israelis had shelled his clinic a dozen times… until Pierre Rehov asked to see the damage. Is there no learning curve?
Israeli leaders insist they’re trying to pressure Hamas militants from firing locally made missiles into Israel, a near daily occurance. But to the vast majority of Gazans — who have nothing to do with the missiles, who are powerless to stop the militants — it amounts to collective punishment.
This is an extraordinary piece of logic. Hamas, the “democratically elected” ruling group surely has power to stop this if they want. Why attribute to the Palestinians impotence in the face of their own people’s behavior. When an Irish suicide terrorist blew himself up, the public disapproval by those whom he purported to fight for, put an end to any further actions of that sort. Public opinion in Gaza is unfortunately in favor of the collective punishment of Israelis in places like Sderot.
In Gaza, they blame Israel. They blame the United States, which supports Israel’s policy toward Hamas. They also blame their own leaders.
“We are cursed,” said Iyad Sarraj, a Gaza psychiatrist and a human rights activist. “Our leaders are either Israeli collaborators, asses, or mentally unstable.”
Sarraj warns that what he describes as the siege of Gaza will blow up in the face of Israel in another intifada, or uprising. “From the first intifada, which was only stone throwing, to the second intifada, which brought suicide bombing, the third intifada will be much, much worse, and I suspect that it will be chemical weapons and chemical warfare.”
But none of my sources who are intimately familiar with the weaponry available to militant groups has mentioned that as a possibility. There are indications that the militants in Gaza, left to their own devices, are up to no good. I was told by reliable sources that Hamas is busy developing new and more effective weapons — rockets with propellant resistant to humidity, higher explosive payloads and longer ranges as well as roadside bombs and other explosive devices. Weapons are being stockpiled, and tunnels are being dug all over Gaza in anticipation of an Israeli invasion. Little in life in Gaza is inevitable, but death and destruction.
Now we get something interesting. He reports all the material necessary for an article that would point a significant finger at Hamas and Palestinian leadership for their problems, but it never makes it into his analysis. The data is there; it just doesn’t compute.
President Bush went to Muqata’a, the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah in the West Bank.
But he didn’t travel around the West Bank to see checkpoints like the one in Hawara, south of Nablus, where Palestinians wait, often for hours, in the winter cold, waiting to be allowed by young Israeli soldiers to go to their homes, universities, businesses, doctor’s appointment, or to visit a relative or a friend.
Or maybe carry out a suicide terror attack on Israelis.
If Bush got through Hawara to Nablus, he’d find a city where the Palestinian Authority, which the United States and Israel are supposed to be supporting, is rapidly losing credibility every time Israeli forces close down the city to round up militants, as they did over the weekend. Israel may have valid security reasons for going in, but these operations do irreparable damage to the standing of Palestinian leaders such as U.S.-backed President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Sallam Fayyad, now often described here as Israeli collaborators.
Again, fascinatingly puerile logic. The result of this thinking is something like this: Israel may have problems with terrorists in the PA. But they shouldn’t do anything because it undermines “moderates” who themselves do nothing to stop the terrorists. Exactly the kind of honor-shame concerns that get everything wrong.
Maybe when the U.S. president went to Bethlehem Thursday, he may have seen what Israel calls its security barrier — a 24-foot-high concrete wall encircling most of the town. Israel put it up to stop suicide bombings, a measure that appears to be working when it come to cutting down on the number of attacks. But the Palestinians call it the “racist apartheid wall.” The wall has all but destroyed the local economy, cutting Bethlehem off from much of its farmland and reducing the flood of tourists to a trickle.
Does Wedeman have a better, non-lethal means of stopping terrorists? The barrier has clearly worked. If Palestinians are unwilling to prevent terrorists from attacking Israel, then they must be ready to bear the consequences, difficult as they may be.
If he had some spare time — and a convincing disguise — I’d be happy to take Bush on a tour of my beat. I’ll do the driving.
On the CNN website, there is a video report from Ben Wedeman about Palestinian suffering and hatred for Bush. In trying to display the extent to which Bush is reviled by ordinary Palestinians, Wedeman interviews an artist who paints his heroes — “Arafat, Che Guevera, Saddam Hussein…but not President Bush.” Wedeman inadvertently provides a lucid example of the Palestinian worship of violent dictators and henchmen that has rendered them incapable of creating a civil society. It is that attitude that is the primary cause for continued Palestinian suffering, not Israeli policy.
“My beat”? The kind of “advocacy” for the poor Palestinians this article expresses — its tone of moral outrage, its defective and partisan analysis, its recycling of unanalyzed accusations — is profoundly unprofessional. But Wedeman seems unaware that he’s a poor journalist, and if, as people here have suggested, he is Jewish, then his aggressive and partisan approach in favor of the Palestinians illustrates well why the presence of Jews throughout the media is not, as the paranoid, Protocols-inspired accusations go, a sign of a massive conspiracy, but rather, counter-intuitively, one of the reasons the media is so anti-Israel. All those Jews who are proud to be ashamed of Israel.
And, of course, the big losers in all this are the Palestinians, who never grow up, partly because people like Wedeman patronize them. “We are cursed…” says the good Palestinian doctor… among other things by an unconsciously racist media that cares more about their moral narcissism than about the real suffering their useful idiocy encourages.
What the hell is wrong with people like Wederman. There is no excuse anymore for the kind of blindness that his account demonstrates. There is no context, no history and no responsibility for what these Arabs do. Attitudes like Wederman’s simply enables more Arab bad behavior. He writes as if there are no suicide bombers, no missle barrages from Gaza, no constant and vicious antisemitic incitement from the PA media, no incitement in PA authorized mosques, etc. His ‘pity’ for the so-called Palestinian doesn’t really help the so-called Palestinians, who live in a sick culture and are warping their children’s brains.
But realistically, Wederman—who by his name sounds like he may be a self-hating Jew—is not any much better than some of the people who write for HaAretz. Or the Israeli Prime Minister. Or President Bush and Condaleeza Rice. I feel like screaming “What is wrong with you people!” But it really wouldn’t do any good.
Richard, I admire your patience for analyzing this B. S.
Comment by Bruce Kodish — January 10, 2008 @ 7:40 pm
Lazar, you write exceedingly well. I so greatly appreciate your ablity to put it into perspective so siccintly.
I wish as was as good, but on this piece I just have to try say something. There were so many factual errors in this article.
He choose the 4% of the security barrier that is wall, instead of the 96% that is fence. I wonder why he forced this to be misrepresentative?
He described the fence as stopping the local economy. But didn’t describe the trials on behalf of Palestinians in Israel court after the fence was initially implemented. In which, the miltary was instructed to move the fence to protect Palestinian livelihoods where appropriate. It’s since been moved a lot. (That’s part of the PA argument to make it a “wall” because fences can be moved.)
He describes the Gazans as powerless against Hamas, rather than the ardent supporters they are for Hamas and it’s policy to not recognize Israel. Some don’t I’m sure - but most? Not what the Palestinian University polls show.
Abbas is NOW being called a collaborator. Did he watch Palestinian TV in the last several years? This is NOT new because of Israeli strkes. All Abbas had to do was say he’d talk with Olmert.
Wederman says “They also blame their own leaders.” Yet he himself doesn’t respect the Palestinians enough to blame their leaders with them. How sad.
The Palestinians have much more common sense about this all, than those who bash Israel as THE cause. The Palestinians and Israelis have an understanding of what’s happening that just doesn’t translate in the media here.
If peace happens it will be in spite of “reporters” like this. That too is very sad.
Comment by cheri — January 10, 2008 @ 8:17 pm
Couldn’t agree more. Let’s not forget, Hamas was voted in. While in many ways I sympathized with the situation of the Palestinians, my opinion changed drastically with the vote. Now they MUST realize the consequences of their vote, much like in the U.S. We can’t take it back, we just have to ride it out until November. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, now that Hamas has their foot in the door, it may be impossible to shut it again.
Comment by Dave R.W. — January 10, 2008 @ 10:26 pm
Hit the nail right on the head. How about this: Israel, despite continued terrorist attacks, continues to allow humanitarian aid directly into those areas from which the attacks come. They allow the families of those who attempt, and hope, to knowingly injure civilians to continue to eat and provide them with power. Despite calls to strangle this serpent called gaza once and for all, they hold out hope that in this pit of evil, there will emerge a partner with whom they con live and forge a future.
Shame on CNN for allowing this terrorist conspirator an international voice.
Comment by Mike Cohen — January 10, 2008 @ 10:47 pm
Great post. I got here from a link at the bottom of the article on CNN.com.
Blaming Israel for the palestinians situation is like blaming society for a drug addicts addiction. If you cant accept responsibility for your actions then you dont deserve any sympathy and your life will never improve.
Comment by Ari — January 11, 2008 @ 12:32 am
To Mr. Wederman: Shame on you for not standing up with your own Jewish people who have been murdered, kidnapped, terrorized and whose life is being threatened on a daily basis! My heart bleeds for the Israeli people on whom missiles are being fired every day. Can you imagine the trauma of terror left on the Israeli citizens and the daily fear of being victims of suicide bombings and missile firing? You are actually betraying your own family!!! You probably have some sort of a complex for being Jewish or you want to secure your job with the antisemitic CNN! Do you find “normal” that our young people have to train in the Israeli Army in order to fight for our survival both in Israel and in the Diaspora, instead of enjoying their youth and pursuing their education earlier? Do you find “normal” that so many financial resources are being spent at defending ourselves and our country from people whose only goal is to seek our destruction? You choose to side with the poor Palestinians who brought their fate upon themselves. Why don’t their wealthy Muslim brothers help them at creating and developing an economy, instead of supplying them with weaponry to kill us? Israel is not responsible for the Palestinians’ way of life that they have chosen. Do you care to support your own neighbours before supporting your family? Tell me, Mr. Wederman, if you knew that a killer was at your door, would you facilitate his entry into your home? This is why we need checkpoints, a wall, etc…. There is no apartheid but there is terrorism to combat. We do not have any other solution! The problem is not about occupation of territory. It would be too easy and simple! The real problem is about hate towards Jews and its propagation in Palestinian schools, books and mosques. Would you have taken President Bush to visit Palestinian schools/mosques and speak to kids about their hate for their Israeli neighbours? We do not teach hate to our children. We love our children and could never dislike the Palestinians enough to send our children as suicide bombers into their territories! If the Palestinians truly want peace and help, all they have to do is stop terrorism, and abandon their ideas of exterminating us and gaining control of the entire Land of Israel. If the Palestinians ever come to their senses - and I pray they do - Israelis, by their compassionate nature and religious beliefs, will be more than happy to treat them as “brothers”! So please try and write articles that promote peace between the two people instead of adding fuel to the fire by justifying the Palestinians’ criminal and abhorrent actions! You may end up having less to write about but you will be accomplishing higher goals!
Comment by Dora Cohen — January 11, 2008 @ 1:13 am
[…] less hot-headed disembowelment of this piece I recommend the cold, irresistible logic of the Augean Stables, where they’re experienced in cleaning out such […]
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Ms. Dora Cohen is correct in saying, “Tell me, Mr. Wederman, if you knew that a killer was at your door, would you facilitate his entry into your home?”. Unfortunately, what she does not understand and refuses to accept is that it was the Jews who were and are the killers that came and continue to come to the Palestinians’ homes and kill. It was Jews who brought misery,hate,killings,terrorism etc into the Palestinians lives. She conveniently chooses to forget how the countries of Europe and the Jews of Europe fought against the Germans during WW2. The terrorist organizations that the Jews set up to fight the Germans, the same terrorist organizations, with modern weapons supplied by the Eurpeans and the Americans, that later came to Palestine and terrorized the Palestinian people, and took away their homes. She forgets that until today the Jews are asking for compensation from the Germans and other European countries. Where is the compensation for the Palestinian people whose homes, factories, farms and their very existence was stolen by the Jews?
Yes, Ms Cohen, it is quite normal for the Jews to train their youths to defend the country they stole, for how else can they keep this land. It is the Jews who chose the path of destruction when they stole Palestine and destroyed the lives of the Palestinians, old and “youths” who are suffering and dying on a daily basis. The Jews planted the seed of hatred in Palestine and its people the Palestinians. And now you are angry because you have to reap what you have sown?
The Arabs opened their doors to the Jews when they were being persecuted by the Europeans and other countries in the middle ages. We gave you the freedom to practice your religion when Europe was killing your people. We gave your old people, your children and young men and women homes, land, jobs and dignity. We gave you Jews a new life. For hundreds of years we lived together, worked together, and our youths went to school together. We inter-married, socialized and we had PEACE. We had PEACE. Yes there was fighting sometime; quite normal. Look at Europe’s history, and they were all Christians. Then the Jews took our their knives and stabbed the Arabs in the back, and have been lying to the world as to why they did that for the last 100 years.
Suicide bombers who kill Jews are not trained. They are just human beings who have gotten fed up with the status quo, got fed up with the Jewish and Arab leaderships, who have had their wives or husbands, their mothers or their fathers, their very existence blown up by somebody else. They have no jet fighters or cruise missiles, no weapons that they can take their revenge with. They have only one weapon, a weapon that God gave them to use in whatever way they think is right. A weapon that they can use to build or destroy; to give or to take; to live in peace or in war. This weapon is their life. And many a brave human being in the wars of the world, whether Jewish, Christian or Moslem has given away his life for country, home, and family. The Palestinians jet fighter is his body! As long as the Jews do not make peace they too will live in misery, sadness and death. It is not for the Palestinians to start the peace process, but for the Jews, who stole their homes, to come to an agreement with the Palestinians to live in peace in Israel/Palestine. Only this way can we make the Middle East beautiful once again and the envy of the whole world. We must get back together; Jews and Moslems, Arabs and Israelis. Throw away your hatred Ms.Cohen.
Comment by M.A.Mardam-Bey — January 11, 2008 @ 6:35 am
M.A.Mardam-Bey:
You clearly know nothing about the history of the establishment of the State of Israel, or the actual cause of the mass exodus of “Arabs” from the area within the 1948 borders. Most were fleeing the threatened annihilation of anything living between the Jordan and the Mediterreanean by a number of invading Arab armies. You are also, no doubt, blissfully ignorant of the large influxes of non-Jews over several decades between the first arrivals of eastern European Jews in the 19th century and 1948, specifically to enjoy the improved local economy that came courtesy of Jewish settlement. You also display total ignorance about the mass purges of Jewish populations from surrounding “Arab” countries - populations that like the Jews of Iraq, had lived there for milenia, or the Sephardim of North Africa, who were bounced back and forth across the straits between Iberia and North Africa, escaping the cruelties of the Inquisition or the cruelties of some of the very nasty Muslim regimes.
What has been witnessed again and again about the IDF is the great care they go to to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. No small feat given the propensities of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah to set up their rocket launchers in farmers’ fields and purpose-built rooms in residential areas in south Lebanon.
What has also bee witnessed again and again, is that the Palestinian leadership has no interest in accepting any Jewish presence in the area, it’s just that Hamas is more open about it than Fatah. Sadly, neither are particularly representative of the 20% of Israel’s population who are deemed “Arab”. The vast majority are well aware that although there are social issues arising from the on-going “Resistance” they enjoy the best standard of living in the Middle East, save and except for the privileged few oil sheiks and have no desire to live under the corrupt, violent and despotic Arab regimes in the region.
Comment by Lynne T — January 11, 2008 @ 12:50 pm
bruce,
he has a better excuse than haaretz: he works in gaza.
would you be able to survive gaza if you did not spread the hamas propaganda?
cheri,
there WON’T be peace. the end will come when one of the sides will give up.
dave,
arabs don’t produce leadership, only corruption and jihadism. it’s their religion and culture.
dora,
arabs never come to their senses. it’s their religion and culture.
lynne,
racism in general and anti-semitism in particular are by definition a product of ignorance and inability to reason. don’t bother with the idiot.
fp
http://fallofknowledgeandreason.blogspot.com/
Comment by fp — January 11, 2008 @ 3:32 pm
this is about bush’s ignorance and stupidity, but it applies equally to wederman and the rest of the idiots:
Whet, not sate muslim appetite
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/019524.php
Comment by fp — January 11, 2008 @ 4:46 pm
Dear M.A.Mardam-Bey:
Your knowledge of the Holocaust is bizzare. Please seek out a history book before you do more damage in this world.
The Jews in Germany were assimilated, living peacefully side by side with the Germans in normal lives and contributing greatly to the welfare of Germany, when Hitler made an mission to make the world Jew-ridden. As part of his plan he secretly tested zyrcon B to see how fast he could liquidate them into the air. He kept it a secret mission for quite a while because he knew the Germans wouldn’t stomach so ghastly a plan at first until they were whipped into as much of a frenzy of jew hatred as you are being whipped into. Also, that he’d never round up the Jews if they had a whiff of it. There were no terrorist Jews in Germany, and almost no fighting back. Hence the expression of the times that they “went like sheep to the slauder.” Please, your ignorance is terrifying. If you have a soul, read GERMANY POST-WAR accounts of what happened to learn what happened. See you don’t have to take any Jewish word for it. Those who did it tell a different tale than you do! Israel has a very close diplomatic relationship with Germany. They wouldn’t do you think, if the Jews made up this story.
Cheri
Comment by cheri — January 12, 2008 @ 12:16 am
fp,
I didn’t say there would be peace. I said, “if there is peace…”
However, peace is a possiblity. There are Arabs who want it and know what it is. It may look dismal and low in numbers, but it’s not nonexistent.
And you say “the end will come what one of the sides gives up.” True, but the Arabs are the ones who give up and the end comes - there will be peace, at least of sorts! Hopefully though we can come up with some agreements that make it easier for the Arabs to give up the destructive mission and want to settle down.
Comment by cheri — January 12, 2008 @ 12:27 am
Speaking as a non-Jewish lefty, I can only agree with the article. I have no expectation of any peace other than that which Israel might impose for a period by force.
The following is an article that I’ve just published on my blogsite but I think it expresses a truth about this current point in history.
Truth and the Cycle of History
It should be increasingly obvious to anybody that we are entering another part of the cycle of history in the affairs of Israel. At the moment when the US president is pushing hardest for peace, the chants of war begin to gather on Palestinian Arab media. A video widely circulated at the height of the suicide bombing campaign has reappeared on Palestinian television, proclaiming its simple message about the glory and reward of the suicide bomber.
Others have written before on this cycle, but the components that make it up are simple. The more the West or Israel desires peace and offers to make concessions, the more that the Arab leadership feel threatened at home. The reason itself is simple and is the result of sixty or seventy years of nationalist and religious hate-mongering, so that “resistance” to Israel is such a basic position of the Arab mental world that any leader attempting to even maintain the pretence of negotiations is immediately branded a traitor.
If the consequences were merely rhetoric, then the worst we could see would a rather bad tempered parliamentary debate or perhaps a riot. But the states of the Middle East are ruled by violence and men of violence. Debate is not possible outside of the protected “court circles” of the state media, and there debate is held hostage to the feelings of the “street”. The price of speaking truth in a world of violence is death.
This is not just the physical death of a body but the death of debate, of honesty and of all moderation.
Soon one of two events will occur. In the first case, peace negotiations will fail because the Arabs don’t want peace, will demand the maximum price from Israel and the West and on finding one item rejected, will declare for “resistance”. The second case, will be that the Palestinian Arab government negotiating will be overthrown by Hamas before any deal can be worked out and the true voice of the people heard – death, bigotry and desolation.
The Arab world and the Palestinian Arabs in particular have been fed a mental, educational and political diet of hatred, racism and religiously inspired bigotry since the first Jewish settlers arrived in what became Israel. Let us not underestimate the consequences of this, nor brush it aside in favour of our own theories and force Israel to give to the men who wish nothing but death or slavery for her people.
Comment by Richard — January 12, 2008 @ 6:08 am
cheri,
don’t confuse wishful thiking with reality. as richard argues quite eloquently, the latter suggests war not peace.
richard,
you got it right, except that the hate-mongering is much deeper than just the propaganda. it’s embedded deep into the arab religion and culture and it has a lot to do with the arabs buried into 7th century primitivity and barbarism which has prevented them from developing a civilized society and making any useful contribution vs. the success of the west. given the islamic indoctrination and the shame-honor basis of arab society, this is an unacceptable state, a gap between what supremacist islam says should be the order of the world–muslims ruling over dhimmis–and reality. it’s intolerable, particularly the success of the jews to humiliate arabs. it cannot be accepted and it never will be.
it is obvious that the US is starting to realize that they are becoming a banana republic, economically, politically, socially and militarily. due to suicidal policies it is now in full descent and the temptation to appease itself out of the hole by scapegoating the jews is something that I predicted would happen for years.
there will be, however, poetic justice: when the west will live under sharia, perhaps they will understand what happened when “they came for the jews” and they did not speak up.
Comment by fp — January 12, 2008 @ 4:24 pm
Hey guys,
Cut wederman some slack. As a jewish journalist reporting from Gaza, how do you expect him to react?
I hope for his sake I didn’t say that too loud.
Comment by Bill — January 12, 2008 @ 9:12 pm
You missed one outright lie by Wederman: “The wall… cutting Bethlehem off… and reducing the flood of tourists to a trickle.” Christmas tourism to Bethlehem was shut down by terrorists using the town as a base, and defiling the Church of the Nativity. It has revived substantially with visitors at near-record levels this year.
Comment by Rich Rostrom — January 13, 2008 @ 2:09 am
1– I don’t believe that Wedemann is Jewish. I have met him at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. Wedemann, by the way, is the family name of an American military family that has produced at least two generals, I believe. This family goes back to a certain follower of Karl Marx or Hegel, named Wedemann, who came to the USA at the time of the Civil War and joined the war against slavery. I don’t believe that they are Marxists today, nor am I sure that Ben Wedemann belongs to this family, although I think it quite possible.
2– Mardam Bey was, if I rightly recall, a Syrian official, probably the foreign minister, around the time in the late 1940s when the Arab world was getting ready to fight Israel. It is obviously pen-name as used here. Our Mardam Bey has very false info about Arab treatment of Jews over the ages.
Comment by Eliyahu — January 13, 2008 @ 11:46 am
It is ironic( the Arab jew-hatred) since most people in the Arab world are NOT ethnically Arabs. Most are still continuations of the ancient peoples who populated the Fertile Crescent.
FP, thanks for your comments. Yes, I know how deep the hatred goes, my suggestion would be that the propaganda can be used to divine current or near future policies and actions by the tyrants and dictators of the region.
Comment by Richard — January 13, 2008 @ 3:45 pm
>my suggestion would be that the propaganda can be used to divine current or near future policies and actions by the tyrants and dictators of the region.
but this is exactly what the west does NOT do. they prefer to ignore the hate-mongering from kindergarten because it is inconvenient: if the did not they would have to consider the implication of fighting it and that’s what they want to wish away because they are scared shitless.
Comment by fp — January 13, 2008 @ 4:20 pm
Jamil Mardam Bey [bey is a Turkish title of respect] was the foreign minister and acting prime minister of Syria after WW2. There is a photo at the site
http://syrianhistory.com/tst.php?table=four&start=120#null
of Jamil Mardam with Hasan al-Banna, founder and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Farouq Mardam Bey [b. 1944] has been an Arab nationalist propagandist, writer, editor, and publisher. He now does his agitprop work from the cozy safety of Western countries. He is an advisor to the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, a multi-million dollar institution occupying many acres of valuable Paris real estate along the Seine and a French tribute to Arab nationalism.
Comment by Eliyahu — January 14, 2008 @ 6:01 am
Fp,
You are not understanding my comments at all. However, I’m not going to explain again.
I will add that your views of Arabs are extremely narrow and do not take into account the wide range of viewpoints they have.
Peace is possible, not wishful thinking. There are many instances in history when it looked dim, and only a small number within had visions outside those.
My main point though is that with further reading you’ll find that you’re focused on only on view of “Arabs” and missing others. I know the view you speak of is true, it’s just not the only truth there. Being as limited in trying to understand others can not lead to movement forward. No wonder you don’t believe there can be any movement.
Comment by cheri — February 23, 2008 @ 3:02 pm
[…] remotely resembling a fair-minded and disinterested reporter. As he showed in an article I fisked here several months ago, he is an open and ardent advocate of Palestinian suffering caused by israeli […]
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