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In Chicago the evening of 31 January 2002 Mark Bruzonsky, Publisher of MER, gave the keynote address at the University of Chicago Model United Nations. The Palmer House Hilton Ballroom was full with more than 2500 persons for the opening session - standing room only. For the first time in the history of the keynote talks at this annual event the speaker received a prolonged standing ovation. 'This has never happened before' said the conference organizer.
'...............
Today the situation in the Middle East is immensely worse than when I represented the International Student Movement for the United Nations at U.N. Headquarters for three years. It has been made worse precisely by the “Middle East Peace Process”. And the basic reason is that all along rather than a true peace process it has been, and it is, a domination and subjugation and repression process…and we have all been taken for a ride!
Let me try to explain in the following way: If you had invited any of the following much more distinguished speakers, most of whom I am fortunate to have as personal friends, here is what they would have told you about the realities of the “Middle East 'Peace Process':
If you had invited Professor NOAM CHOMSKY: “The agreements incorporate the extremist version of U.S.-Israeli rejectionism…and are closest to the Sharon Plan of the early 1980s….. [They] should be compared to the institution of that monstrous system of Apartheid in the former South Africa…(upon the Palestinian people).”
If you had invited Professor EDWARD SAID: “There is a wanton murder of language evident in the phrase 'peace process'… At a time when people are suffering and shabby leaders are reaping Nobel Prizes that only enable more exploitation, it is crucial to bear witness to the truth… Far from bringing peace [the agreement] will bring greater suffering for Palestinians and an assured threat to the Israeli people…. Every leader involved with the Oslo peace process – Palestinian, Israeli, American or European – has acted without principles and without anything remotely resembling vision and truthfulness. Worse, large droves of intellectuals, scholars and experts have betrayed their vocations, to say nothing of their expertise and knowledge, and this betrayal has contributed to the amazingly compliant attitude of the American media in particular, who have celebrated, extolled, saluted and rejoiced, where there has been neither occasion nor cause to justify such excessive handclapping and jubilation.”
If you had invited DR. EYAD SARRAJ - Dr. Sarraj, a distinguished Palestinian, who has his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard by the way, made these remarks at a Georgetown University forum:
' We are not against the rule of law, in fact we want the rule of law. We want fairness and equality before the law. We want to feel that the people have rights, and they are dignified; after so many years of brutality and repression and humiliation at the hands of the Israelis. This is what the people here are longing for - dignity, and pride…
Dr. Sarraj wrote an important essay titled “Why We Have All Become Suicide Bombers” five years ago now. It was widely published throughout the world, except in the US. In it Dr. Sarraj wrote: “the struggle of Palestinians today is how not to become a bomb and the amazing thing is not the occurrence of the suicide bombing, rather the rarity of them.”
If you had invited ROBERT FISK – the Western correspondent longest in the Middle East region, writing for The Independent in London for the past quarter century: He made these remarks in an interview with me also five years ago now, long before recent events proved him right:
'I put 'peace process' in quotation marks when I write about it in my newspaper, it is an American expression, it is definitely not a Middle Eastern expression… All one can say about the 'Peace Process' now is that it is dead, it is finished, it is over, and the most remarkable thing I find in coming now to the States is the degree to which people do not realize that. I have to live the reality of the Middle East and I have not met anyone in the past two to three months including those who originally, wrongly in my view, believed it would work who does not now believe that it is dead, and finished completely.'
If you had invited HAIDAR ABDUL-SHAFI – a most distinguished secular Palestinian who was Chairman of the Palestinian Delegation at the Madrid Conference and all subsequent international negotiations until Oslo – and by the way, he refused to attend the White House ceremony in 1993 predicting what was to come:
'How do we view the acts of resistance by Hamas and the Islamists? Palestinians are entitled to resort to all sorts of measures including legitimate armed struggle to try to rid themselves of occupation. The Israeli position, which is based on Israeli military power and with heedlessness toward legality, and legitimacy, and United Nations resolutions, is actually a cause for violence... Israel in the recent time killed so many Palestinians in cold blood, Palestinians that it apprehended and could have arrested, but it preferred to kill them… The world is going to realize that this peace process is not really a peace process, it is hopeless….'
If you had invited PROFESSOR CHARLES BLACK* – one of America's most respected scholars of Constitution and International law who taught his entire career at the Yale University Law School. And yes, here too, no one would publish these views in the USA, the first time in his life Professor Black could not find a publisher for his essay about the U.S., Israel, and the Palestinians:
“They are imprisoned under obscene conditions, after kangaroo trials, or no trials at all. They are regularly shot at; enough of them are killed to make death ever-present… Many are maimed; many are disfigured for life. Yet they come out in the streets again and again, these young people… What name shall we give to the trait of character that produces conduct like that? Why do you hesitate? You know what the word is. Do you hesitate because that word just never happens to be spoken in American in application to these young Palestinians people? Or is it because you fear that a revolution in your thought and feeling will have to follow your pronouncing the word? Well, you're very likely right about that last. That makes you nervous? So let me help you. I'll start things off by saying the word for you the first time. The word is 'courage'”
And finally, though I could go on and on in this vein, had you invited ARUNDHATI ROY – Winner of India's most prestigious literary prize – and again published throughout the world, except in the US. Here she is writing about the World Trade Tower/Pentagon attacks:
'Could it be that the anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government's record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things -- to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)?'
'Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other's rhetoric. Each refers to the other as 'the head of the snake'. Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed - one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless… The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other.'
'With all due respect to President Bush, the people of the world do not have to choose between the Taliban and the U.S. government. All the beauty of human civilisation - our art, our music, our literature - lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles. There is as little chance that the people of the world can all become middle-class consumers as there is that they will all embrace any one particular religion. The issue is not about good v. evil or Islam v. Christianity as much as it is about space. About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the impulse towards hegemony every kind of hegemony, economic, military, linguistic, religious and cultural.”
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