Does Abbas Have Any English Speaking Advisors?

Those among you with good memory may recall the Camp David peace talks of 2000. If you do not remember, you may be uninformed. If you remember, then you know of the talks when Arafat was offered everything the Palestinians could ever aspire to, but he turned it down and turned to instigating the 2nd Intifada because he prefers continuous bloodshed and loves killing Jews. So if you remember from the mass media, you are misinformed, to paraphrase my good friend Mark Twain.

In 2000, Clinton and Ehud Barak virtually asked Arafat to sign the Palestinians’ rights and cause off away in return for concession that were not only pathetically insignificant, but also were not written down on any document. So what does our glorious leader Arafat do? Just what you and I would, he takes a hit in the ego, storms out of Camp David, wears his gloomy, terrorgasmic face that the NY Times loves to display on the first page, and heads back to his shell in Ramallah without saying a word to anybody. (Well… he actually wrote an op-ed for the NY Times a year later.)

Not that the media needed any help to be biased, but Arafat was of great help. The media had a field day telling us all about how Palestinians are the obstacle for peace because they love to kill Jews, and they will never make peace because you can never offer them enough, and Israelis — the good-hearted victims — are dying to make peace but find no partner. To the extent that I began to doubt my own outlook on life and begane to question whether I, a Palestinian, am just made for death and destruction.

For a long time, that sentiment was so prevailing that it became Washington DC and US media common wisdom, and still is, except that two years later Seth Ackerman painstakingly researched and eloquently debunked the Myth Of the Generous Offer. (But don’t expect those politically X-rated views to get play in mainstream media, so you really have to research for it.)

It is really hard to exaggerate the damage and harm said media campaign has inflicted on the support for the Palestinian cause in the US, so it is only logical to expect that Abbas and Co. — charging to Annapolis this week — would do their homework and perhaps prepare a media statement if not a set of individuals to conduct interviews and appear on news talk shows (something that seems to come intuitively to their Israeli counterparts).

Or so you think…

On my drive home from work, my radio happened to be tuned into NPR when All Things Considered was on. They advertised an interview with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to come later in the hour. The fact they spoke of no interview with Abbas or a Palestinian representative caused even KABOBcorrespondent Chaim Sugarman to quickly speculate that the pro-Zionist media is about to play another one-sided, biased campaign that won’t even interview Palestinians. Because there is no way, the Palestinian delegation could make the same fatal mistake again, especially when the whole conference is little more that a PR campaign.

Well, at the end of Olmert’s interview, Bob Siegel made it clear that his requests for interview with the Palestinian president and the unconstitutional prime minister were declined.

And to answer my opening rhetorical question, yes, Abbas has English speakers around, including his Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, who is rather well spoken, when he wants to be. But I guess speaking English does not necessarily mean K street smart…