My neighbor TigerHawk posted on Afif Safieh, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization Mission to the United States, speaks at Princeton just now. He’s as surprised as I was on the warm welcome,
The University went to great pains to report that Safieh was first invited to speak at Princeton by Abraham Udovitch, “the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East,” and that virtually every campus organization joined in the invitation. When Safieh stepped to the podium, the crowd applauded more loudly than I have ever heard at a Princeton lecture.
Indeed, more loudly than when Eli Weisel was introduced when he was on campus. TigerHawk continues,
It is, I think, a measure of the chicness of the Palestinian cause on college campuses that a man who joyfully worked for Yassir Arafat for almost twenty years would be received with such warmth and acclaim.
Speaking as he was to an essentially converted audience (there were a few obviously grumpy old townies and a few probably Jewish students who asked edged questions, but they were in the deep minority), Safieh was explicit in his objective — to influence his audience to campaign for an American foreign policy that would be “non-aligned.” True to his billing, Safieh was extremely polished and charming, and spoke as if he were giving a stump speech in a long campaign, a speech he had given many times and that he would give many times again.
…
This is a relentless Palestinian theme — that there is moral equivalence between suicide bombings targeting civilians and Israeli strikes against members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, or unintended civilian casualties related to those strikes. This attitude is extraordinarily widespread in the world, as we all saw law summer when the globe’s chattering classes weighed the unintended casualties from Israeli strikes far more heavily than the directed casualties from Hezbollah’s missiles.
Read his entire report.
Update Don’t miss Atlas Shrug‘s post.
Prior posts: A friend’s question
Report: Afif Safieh at Princeton University
Update, Friday, January 18 If you really are Afif Safieh
OK, watched an hourlong video of him from last year at the northern CA World Affairs Council.
Having *just* read a memoir by a old Communist militant, which berates the USSR’s diplomatic corps of the 1930s for being “careerist” (H. Arendt’s phrase) and “finding their niche” (pop American phrase) within the Stalinist hierarchy in order to gain comfy sinecures in the capitals of Western Europe, I will gladly admit that this is the primary critical lens through which I regard Mr. Safieh. I don’t mean this maliciously against Mr. Safieh — I’m just trying to get a handle on who is, and might be, within the Palestinian (here, Fateh) hierarchies. As for the tie-in to Soviet history, it is often lost on us (commenting here with an anti-Communist edge which most liberals and certaily all fellow-travellers lack), but I find it relevant.
A few years ago I heard another Palestinian representative speak in public in nothern CA. I was proud for being sympathetic to her, and for having taken pains to “understand” their side of the narrative. It would have taken a little firestorm of assiduous logic to force me to reconsider my opinions then. Such a “little firestorm” is what I feel we have to conjure and present now.
Mr. Safieh’s cultured and witty. His voice is mild, his bearing soft. He is Christian and seasons his phrases with references to Europe and France. He even blatanlty flattered the San Francisco audience for being “enlightened.”
But I think of that Soviet dissident writing about the 1930s, and I suspect that there must be more here than meets the eye.
What I have said in the lecture is “ I never compare the Palestinian Nakba/ Catastrophe to the Holocaust. Each tragedy stands on its own. I never indulge in comparative martyrology. If I were a Jew or a gypsy, Nazi barbarity would be the most horrible event in History. If I were a Native American it would be the arrival of European settlers that resulted in almost total extermination. If I were a Black African, it would be slavery in previous centuries and Apartheid during last century. If I were an Armenian, it would be the Ottoman/ Turkish massacres. If I were Palestinian- and I happen to be one- it would be the Nakba. Humanity should condemn all the above. I do not know of a way to measure suffering or how to quantify pain, but what I do know is that we are not children of a lesser God.” I believe these are not the words of a sick person or of an ethno-centered tribalist, but of a universalist
If you really are Afif Safieh, there are three questions I’d like to ask you.