If you really are Afif Safieh

I've been away most of the day and just noticed a comment on this post by a person claiming to be Afif Safieh. The comment reads,

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 the person who wrote the comment cares to go back and read that post and the prior two related posts, they can plainly see that I have not called Mr. Safieh names ("sick person", "ethno-centered tribalist").

If you, the person who left that comment, really are Afif Safieh, I and other bloggers would like to ask you,

• As a Christian whose father is buried in a Catholic cemetery, how can you associate yourself closely with a man who weaponized people to kill others by committing suicide when suicide is the most grievous sin in Christianity?


• Why was there no push for a Palestinian state when Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza, before the 1967 war?


• Israel's three conditions are:
  Cessation of hostilities and terror
  Secure borders.
  Diplomatic recognition of Israel.
  What exactly is one sided and unfair? What possible reason could the Palestinians have for not going along with the plan? In doing so, the floodgates of foreign aid, investment and all kinds of benefits would open?

Those are the questions we have for the real Afif Safieh.

More on the Safieh lecture

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

A friend's question

Yesterday I attended a lecture at the university where a very high-ranking PLO official presented himself as a victim of Israel. The material introducing this man specified that the speaker

served from 1978 to 1981 as a staff member in the office of Yasser Arafat, former chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in Beirut, Lebanon

This self-proclaimed victim of Israel lives a life of privilege, lecturing across the world on the Palestinian cause. He socializes with the elites, wears fine clothes, and travels in style. Some victim.

The lecturer believes that Arafat

was a great man, undeniably one of the greatest of the second half of the twentieth century

Arafat, who basically invented airplane hijackings and suicide bombings, whose evil and venality can be matched by few.

But the lecture was not surprising.

What surprised me was how many people in the audience of 300 nodded in agreement to his statements. We're talking about an audience at a very rich town, listening in a large, well-appointed hall in one of the foremost universities in America. That audience applauded for nearly two minutes after the lecture was finished.

There were people there I know. People who are well-informed. People who supposedly know about the Middle East. People who take time to attend lectures and read on the subject. People who go to church. Those people were applauding a Christian whose father is buried at a Catholic cemetery but who nonetheless defends a monster who saw nothing wrong in weaponizing children to kill the people of the only democracy in the region.

Those were the people applauding the speaker.

So this morning, when Sigmund, Carl and Alfred, who is a good man, and a friend, asked in his post,

Does anyone seriously believe that the pious and noble words, spoken with such reasonableness in European languages by the Palestinians, can disguise their continued refusal to accept Israel's existence?

I couldn't help but remember yesterday's pius and noble words, spoken with such reasonableness in heavily accented English by a terrorist apologist, and I remember the hundred or so people nodding in agreement to those same words.

And I have to answer my friend's question, and say, yes.

That two minutes' applause opened my eyes.
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Update Kesher Talk has two posts of interest Working on mysteries without any clues
and Meet the new PLO diplomat

Update, Friday, January 18 If you really are Afif Safieh

Report: Afif Safieh at Princeton University

Yesterday Afif Safieh, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization Mission to the United States, gave a lecture at Princeton University on his perspective on the relationship between Palestine and Israel. There were approximately 300 people in the standing-room audience.

The title of the lecture was "Israel/Palestine: History Is Undecided" but Mr. Safieh essentially declaimed (almost word-by-word) his 2001 lecture (PDF file) Diplomacy in the Middle East: The art of delaying the inevitable, and parts of his 2004 lecture Which way is forward?, while repeatedly asserting, "I am a victim of the Israelis", and that the reason the peace process has failed is "not the Arabs' rejection of Israel, but Israel's rejection of the Arab acceptance of Israel".

Following Mr. Safeih's declamation, there was a question and answer session:
Q. 1 Going by the premise that it's morally wrong of both Israel and suicide bombers to kill, how does one get Arab leaders to appear on CNN and condemn suicide bombers?
and, following the Iranian Holocaust denial conference, how does one get Arab leaders to denounce it?
AS: "I have condemned every single suicide bombing, and am glad to point out that in 2006 there was only one suicide bombing.
"Whoever doesn't condemn Israeli invasions and Israel's untargeted and unqualified assassinations has no grounds for moral judgment.
"The Iranian conference was in extremely poor taste. As a person who has suffered, I have great sympathy for what they have suffered. Every national tragedy stands on its own: the Native Americans with the whites' arrival, the blacks with slavery, the Armenians under the Ottomans, and yet there is a need for soul searching: A community who doesn't understand the suffering it inflicts won't understand why it's causing it."

Q. 2: Regarding the road map, does the Bush administration care?
AS: "The quartet (US, EU, UN, and Russia) diplomacy's construction of a road map should have in mind the final destination of the road map: the return to the 1967 boundaries." Safieh's interested in the final destination: "we need acceleration".
He went on to repeat that diplomacy in the Middle East is the art of delaying the inevitable for as long as possible, and quoted Nahum Goldman as saying that "we should agree on a final destination at the beginning, deal with it now, and move forward".
Safieh believes in the importance of the American role, and "we should work on the nature of the Americans' advice."

Q. 3: What would be the final destination for the city of Jerusalem?
AS: "There are eight residential neighborhoods within Jerusalem and my family came from there... The international community and the Vatican also believe in two capitals in one, two national aspirations, and three religious rites of equal importance. I would like to see Jerusalem undivided".

Q. 4: What is status of the Geneva plan? Is it a possible approach?
AS: Safieh was not involved but the Palestinian parties had the blessings of Yasser Arafat. On the Israeli side, the people involved were not key players, were mostly from the left wing of the Labor party, and didn't have the blessings of the country's leadership.

Q. 5: Does AS hold Yasser Arafat responsible for walking away from the Clinton administration's peace negotiations?
AS: "People are rewriting what happened. First of all, if one goes by what the minister of Israel is saying, the Camp David of 2000, from what I have read was the most chaotic event in the history of humanity" (the audience chuckled). "Unfortunately we still suffer from the perception of what happened and Arafat is seen as having to carry the responsibility." AS mentioned a Washington Post article where it said that Israel should have shown more independence, and had Clinton proposed in July what he proposed in December, they would have come to an agreement.
"Now we deal with mutilated reality... Barat is a very complex person, and he came without a coalition and wanted to humiliate his political adversaries, and went back saying we no longer have a Palestinian partner".

Q. 6: Do you think that recent actions of the American administration are contributing?
AS: "The decisions are not wise" ... AS regrets that the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report are not followed. "It is the unresolved nature of the Palestinian problem that has soured recent events"...
When it comes to American politics vis-a-vis Palestine, "the superpower has the choice of being loved and respected, or feared and hated."

Q. 7: A student who went on a trip to Israel told of a soldier telling them to not go on a tour of the Christian quarters "because there are Arabs there".
AS: What we need is peace guaranteed by the international community, deployment of foreign troops, and a symbollic presence by the Security Council of the UN, so the Palestinians will be welcome in Jerusalem".
(note: He stressed the symbolic aspect).

Q. 8: "You mention the Israeli rejection of Arab acceptance, but the 2000 Camp David agreement specified that Israel would return 90% of the land" (the student asking the question went on to specifically detail all the provisions)... "How is it that you see Israel's rejection of Arab acceptance?"
AS: AS complimented the student on his knowledge, "if you think 90% is acceptable. I believe in 100% peace, yet it was not even 90%, it was 85%. and was not offered Jerusalem... In Jerusalem, Israel wanted the Western Wall, which is 400 meters long, with 2/3 of the old city of Jerusalem". He went on to blame the "Israeli refusal of Arab acceptance", and said that "Within Hamas the majority school of thought is that of pragmatism: if Israel withdraws to the '67 borders".

The lecture concluded with a long round of applause by the audience.

TigerHawk was there, too. I'll link to his post when it's up. Here's his post

Update Follow-up post: A friend's question.
More on the Safieh lecture
The Daily Princetonian also carried a news item.

Update, Friday, January 18 If you really are Afif Safieh