Representative Press Blog

"Interesting".

More than interesting I think. Very sad for several reasons. I take no joy in knowing facts that are intentionally omitted or not know because of someone's ignorance, willful or not. It is sad that such misery has continued because of the US veto and it is sad because people are suppressing this fact.

"I read the resolution."

Josef, don't you feel manipulated? The story line that is pushed by those in power isn't true.

"Friedman's point wasn't a silly resolution."

I hope you rethink that. "silly" is an extremely inappropriate thing to say. I can only lay out the facts, I can't make you take them seriously. You are trying to dismiss something that is deadly serious, it isn't silly at all. Josef, what would you have had Arafat do? He agreed to terms considered reasonable by virtually the entire world and accepted peace, and that wasn't the only time he agreed to peace yet had it thrown back in his face. I can't make you change your mind. I could start listing example after example. I can back up my claim that Friedman is a propagandist and liar but if everything I present is dismissed as "silly" where does that get us? If you want to put your hands over your ears and insist that you can't be reasoned with, then obviously you will never admit the facts. Back in pre-civil war days I think abolitionists encountered the same kind of stubbornness with the same kind of patterns of behaviors.
I have other examples about Friedman but to deal with Friedman's claim that "all Arafat did" was "express aspiration." Friedman is lying to his readers. Accepting the terms of a peace offer is not expressing an aspiration, it is agreeing to make peace, it is taking an action that is seen by nearly the entire world as just. It is the US action that prevented peace. Note that this fact is intentionally suppressed in the mainstream media in the US. This is part of a pattern. Friedman lied in 1987 when he wrote that the PLO "refuses to negotiate." He wrote that three years after Arafat issued several calls for negotiations leading to mutual recognition, "eleven years after the PLO supported the Security Council resolution calling for a settlement based on UN 242 modified to include a Palestinian state, alongside Israel, not to speak of the record through these years - all safely buried."

The New York Times is withholding facts from the public. "when Yasser Arafat issued the calls fro recognition in 1984, the NYT refused to print not only the facts but even letters referring to them." When "Friedman reviewed "Two Decades of Seeking Peace in the Middle East" a few months later, the major Arab(including PLO) initiatives of these two decades were excluded and discussion was restricted to various US rejectionist proposals." see Chomsky, "World Orders Old and New" pp. 241-242

Josef, I went to the library to check if this was the case. I have the photocopy right in front of me, it is incredible, just as Chomsky described it. If you aren't willing to do the work and be willing to challenge your assumptions then I don't know what to tell you.