For more than a quarter century I have been an ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause, of freeing their homeland from Israeli soldiers and colonists and all the brutality and suffering involved in the Occupation. This has not been easy path to tread since most Americans know little about Palestine beyond what they are told by a biased media and elected officials utterly terrified of Zionist money opposing them in their next election.
Terrorist acts on the part of radical Palestinians have also not helped the cause, especially given Americans' general ignorance of the equally heinous and more extensive state terrorism practiced by Israel in Palestine and Lebanon. For these reasons I feel compelled to comment on the understandably horrible image of Palestinians celebrating the mass murder in New York and Washington, D.C.
First of all, we must be careful of drawing general conclusions from tiny bits of evidence. What most saw was a photo or a short video clip of a woman and a number of children celebrating. When the camera pulls away in the full clip, what you see is just that small group amid a lot of people simply going about their business. It is dangerous to assume from this one image that all Palestine was cheering the terrorists on.
I spent two weeks in Palestine the summer after the Gulf War and met with a lot of Palestinians: farmers, small businessmen, sundry professionals, but no members of extremist organizations.
I stayed two nights with families in an occupied village, Bani Naim. These people all welcomed us warmly, including the Jews in our group, and made it clear they had no animosity towards Americans. Because of the unqualified diplomatic and economic support for Israel, it is our government they despise, and I can certainly understand this.
I constantly asked Palestinians why they had supported Saddam Hussein. Surely they did not think he actually cared about Palestine. Most all agreed that Saddam cared nothing for them or even his own people, but what they saw was someone actually striking out at Israel and the United States and that was enough.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
If Palestinians did cheer on Sept. 11, it was not for the death of innocent Americans, but for the sight of someone actually attacking the power that has contributed mightily to their suffering.
Suppose, for your entire life, you lived in a town that was constantly patrolled by soldiers from a foreign country that claimed that your homeland for centuries in fact belonged to them.
Suppose that, year in and year out, for more than 30 years, you watched them beat up your relatives and bulldoze your neighbors' houses and olive trees and cut off you water and electricity.
Suppose you had to watch helplessly as your family's land was confiscated in order to build a colony for these foreigners, whose enclaves featured all the amenities of an affluent American suburb.
And suppose it was the United States that was enabling these foreigners by granting them billions in military and economic aid each year and providing them unqualified diplomatic support against world opinion.
I ask you: exactly how would you come to feel about America? That so many Palestinians were willing to treat me, an American, so well in fact suggests a generosity of spirit that is beyond some people on this campus.
And just so there will no misunderstanding among the "love it or leave it" crowd: I love this country. I love the personal freedom and incredibly comfortable material existence it affords me. But most of all, I love the values it stands for, even if my government and fellow citizens sometimes ignore them.
I am delighted that Western values are rapidly overcoming the rest of planet. To be sure, the Americanization of the world means the export of a great deal of shallowness, bad taste and plain stupidity. That same cultural package includes Oprah, McDonald's and Pat Robertson, which has at its core, some mighty attractive ideas (most of them the gifts of the Greeks): constitutionalism, rationalism, freedom of expression, separation of church and state, humanism and a focus on the individual.
This is very good stuff, even if it comes wrapped in much of the vapidity and hypocrisy of contemporary American culture.
But my love for this society is not blind, and I will not rush out and buy a flag and march in lock step toward some sort of violent action to be determined by a handful of men more concerned with their political and military careers than any notion of justice or even what is best for America.
I would volunteer whatever services I could offer were my country to declare war and commit itself to taking out the Taliban or the government of Iraq, but I cannot support simply making the miserable and generally innocent inhabitants of these countries suffer even more because they are unlucky enough to have evil people as their heads of state. The Japanese people supported their emperor and government in 1941; I rather doubt many Iraqis and Afghanis are very enthusiastic about theirs - until we bomb them and give them a reason to be, that is.
Commentators have suggested that in dealing with terrorism we have a role model: Israel. Yes, and I expect Mussolini was a role model for Hitler.
Do we really want to be an international pariah, a state that routinely engages in assassination and torture and treats its neighbors as sub-humans?
Do we want to emulate a country whose current head of state has as much innocent blood on his hands as any of the New York terrorists?
It is bad enough that our unqualified (even to the point of ignoring violations of American law and attacks on American servicemen) aid enables these immoral activities, but I fear for my nation when we begin to engage in them ourselves.
by Richard M. Berthold
Daily Lobo Columnist
