Before Reading This New York Times Op-Ed, 3 Things You Need to Willfully Overlook .

Pesach Benson..
Honest Reporting/Backspin..
04 September '12..





History professor Paul Thomas Chamberlin makes the case for talking to terrorists using President Nixon’s decision not to deal with the PLO as a case study.

He writes in a New York Times op-ed:

By failing to strengthen moderates within the P.L.O. and effectively locking the Palestinians out of the Arab-Israeli peace process, American officials sidelined potential peacemakers and pushed Palestinian national ambitions to the back burner. The decision to label all armed Palestinian groups “terrorists” postponed negotiations with the P.L.O. by 15 critical years, during which time the Lebanese civil war and the intifada helped spawn more militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. By the time relations were finally established in the late 1980s, Hamas’s star was already rising.

This historical revisionism requires you to willfully overlook three points:

1) The “moderate” PLO openly called for Israel’s destruction during the 70s.

2) The “moderate” PLO only got a seat at the table by paying lip service to renouncing violence in the 90s.

3) Once in power, the “moderate” PLO fueled a violent intifada.

Talking to Terrorists

Lee Smith
Tabletmag.com
03 March '10

“If you can talk to an insurgency that kills Americans, it should be easy to talk to ones that don’t,” Mark Perry tells me on the phone. Perry is author of the recently published Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage With Its Enemies, a book documenting his meetings with terrorists around the Middle East, including officials from Hamas and Hezbollah. But his favorite template for successful engagement with terrorists is the Sunni insurgency in Iraq that eventually partnered with the Americans and turned against al-Qaida in Iraq. Perry argues that al-Qaida is the one terrorist group we shouldn’t be talking to, since it has no natural constituency and no interest in the democratic process. The others, Perry says, are “national resistance movements.”

Perry, who has lived and traveled in the Middle East for several decades, started talking to terrorists during the second intifada, when he built relationships with Hamas leaders like Ismail Haniyeh, Abdul Azziz Rantissi, and Mahmoud al-Zahar. These contacts would eventually lead to Perry’s partnership with former British intelligence official Alastair Crooke of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum, an organization that regularly meets with terrorists and arranges meetings with non-active Western policymakers and diplomats. Perry left Conflicts Forum in the wake of Iran’s June presidential election, when he and Crooke found themselves on opposing sides. “He wrote an article on the June elections that showed disregard for the demonstrators,” says Perry. “And I wrote a piece castigating the regime and showing admiration for the opposition.”

Still, Perry has not lost his enthusiasm for the Iranian regime’s violence-prone proteges, like Hezbollah. How, I asked him, can the Party of God be considered democratic if its forces overran Beirut in May 2008, when the democratically elected government made a decision that Hezbollah didn’t like? The government, explained Perry, “wanted to take away Hezbollah’s privileges, so they pushed back.” Apparently, the fact that Hezbollah members only killed a few dozen of their fellow Lebanese before handing over their positions to the Lebanese Armed Forces makes them democratic.

“I’m not a reconciliation freak,” says Perry. “I’m not a pacifist. The vulnerability of my book is that people may come away thinking that simply by talking or listening, the scales will fall from our eyes. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Sometimes, you sit down with them and you’re thinking, Holy cow—conflict is inevitable.” Still, he believes that Hamas may be willing to make a transition similar to that of the Iraqi insurgency and come to the negotiating table with Israel.

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