Levin - Touching A Nerve -- Palestinian Origins

Andrea Levin
CAMERA Media Analysis
22 December '11

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=35&x_article=2170



U.S. presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s comments in an interview with The Jewish Channel, released December 9, 2011 triggered outraged denunciations by Palestinian Arabs and Arab Americans, as well as a condemnation by the Arab League. The controversy was still percolating a week later with an angry column by former Senator John Sununu in the The Boston Globe on December 16.

Gingrich had said:

Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman empire. And I think we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community.

Palestinian Arab leaders quickly branded the statements "ridiculous," "racist," "vulgar," "ignorant," and a threat to "peace and stability" and media outlets largely covered the controversy as a political faux pas, an indicator of pandering to Jewish voters and an attempted detour away from creating a Palestinian state. Indeed, many journalists inferred and reported that the Gingrich statements primarily indicated opposition to modern day statehood for Palestinians. The former speaker's office issued a statement a day after the Jewish Channel interview explicitly saying he "supports a negotiated peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, which will necessarily include agreement between Israel and the Palestinians over the borders of a Palestinian state." But the furor continued.

Many media outlets relayed the outrage of Palestinian leaders:

An Arab Liberal Explains What's Wrong and Dreams His Worst Nightmare

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
26 January '10

You couldn’t do better to understand the contemporary Middle East than through an al-Jazira television program recorded and translated by MEMRI. The speaker is Moncef al-Marzouki, a Paris-based Tunisian human rights activist.

Note: if you read to the end of this article you will encounter the stinger, like a horror movie’s last scene when the monster leaps out and devours the hero.

Marzouki lives in Paris, which tells a lot. It’s hard to live in the Arabic-speaking world and express such frank opinions. Moreover, he is very much exposed to Western influences which flavors his thought and, by the same token, distances him from those living in the Middle East.

While under the themes of Political Correctness and multiculturalism, those in the West celebrate and flatter Arab political culture, the people who actually live under that system are in despair.

While those in the West usually argue the main complaint of Arabic-speakers is about what foreigners do to them, their real problem is what their own leaders do to them.

While in Western universities, students are most often taught about the Middle East along the lines of Arab nationalist ideology, their best counterparts in the region are imprisoned and tortured by regimes holding that doctrine. Meanwhile, these victims’ ill-treatment of is applauded by the Western professors’ ideological counterparts in the Arabic-speaking world.

(Read full article)
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