|
Comment on this article |
Email this Article
|
|
News :: Miscellaneous |
|
Will Build It: A Pundit’s Straw Man |
Current rating: 0 |
by Seth Sandronsky
(No verified email address) |
05 Apr 2002
|
|
Offered in reply to George Will's lame column in the equally lame News-Gazette today (Friday, April 5). |
George Will sees the specter of Nazis in the Mideast. Take Yasser Arafat. He is "a Goebbels echoed by gullible news media," Will editorialized recently.
Goebbels was a Nazi propagandist. For Will, he was a forerunner of Arafat.
"The culture of death that he has assiduously cultivated has produced a Palestinian population intoxicated with a pogrom mentality," Will wrote about Arafat. Apparently, religious persecution drives the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
Will also dripped scorn for journalists who interviewed Arafat from his compound in Ramallah as it was attacked by Israeli forces. Too much press freedom can be a risky thing for Will.
Accordingly, reporting the views of Israel's political opponents such as Arafat demonstrates his ability to fool journalists. Will knows this to be true perhaps because he is an objective journalist, and can't be so easily tricked.
Additionally, Will framed Israel's sequestering of Arafat with "Europe's appeasement reflex, which is still strong 64 years after Munich." Obviously, Europeans are unaware that in communicating with an isolated Arafat that they are expecting the tiger of the new Third Reich (the leader of the Palestinian Authority), to change its stripes.
England's leadership made a similarly fatal mistake with Nazi leaders before World War II. For Will, the Free World still hasn't learned its lesson on dealing with evil.
Them and us. Darkness and lightness.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is defending Israeli Jews, continued Will. He, however, faulted Sharon's "military tentativeness" concerning his undelivered threat to exile Arafat.
Regrettably, Sharon is following in the footsteps of former President Reagan and candidate (now president) Bush, Will added. They also said one thing and did another in dealing with Arafat, who can't be trusted.
The other side lies. Our side tells the truth.
Our leaders and ally have good intentions. But we know where the roads paved this way lead.
The fact of the matter is that Sharon, Reagan and Bush dropped the ball when they had a chance to neutralize the problematic Palestinian leader, according to Will. But he has a solution.
It follows from Israel's illegal acquisition and occupation of the West Bank. "Sharon should ship Arafat to Europe, where there is much official sympathy for him," Will concluded.
Will's view of the presumed Nazi threat to Israel posed by Arafat in particular and the Palestinian people in general is a straw man. This fiction of the militarily weak being otherwise is also present in the hearts and minds of Will's fellow travelers such as the Israeli lobby.
Will and the Israeli lobby have many goals. A big goal is to continue the occupation-that is, the occupation of the U.S. Congress.
This system has sent billions of American tax dollars to the Israeli air force, army and navy to make the Mideast safe for U.S. investors. The economics of U.S. foreign policy in the region isn't in Will's public pronouncements.
Instead, they feature the Nazism of Arafat, political representative of a people who have no armed forces. Nor do they have a legal state, unlike Israel.
Will wants us to forgot this. We shouldn't.
Let us not forget one more thing. Will's equation of the Palestinian people's freedom struggle as a representative of the Third Reich's barbarism does a disservice in the extreme to the memory of Jews killed by the Nazis.
Seth Sandronsky is an editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento's progressive newspaper. |
See also:
http://www.commondreams.org/
|
