-Caveat Lector- fwd from cia_drugs:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cia-drugs/message/31782 PALESTINE, PALESTINIANS, AND INTERNATIONAL LAW* By Francis A. Boyle Professor of International Law Legal Advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization on Creation of the State of Palestine (1987-1989) Legal Advisor to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations (1991-1993) Sometime Legal Advisor to the Provisional Government of the State of Palestine * � Copyright 2002 by Francis A. Boyle. All rights reserved. The viewpoints expressed here are solely my own. I am not Arab. I am not Jewish. I am not Palestinian. I am not Israeli. I am Irish American. Our People have no proverbial "horse in this race." What follows is to the best of my immediate recollection: The Big Lie Growing up in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s while strongly supporting the just struggle of African Americans for civil rights, I was brainwashed at school as well as by the mainstream news media and popular culture to be just as pro-Israel as everyone else in America. Then came the 1967 Middle East War. At that time, my assessment of the situation was that Israel had attacked these Arab countries first, stolen their lands, and then driven out their respective peoples from their homes. I then realized that everything I had been told about Israel was "The Big Lie." Israel was Goliath, not David. I resolved to study the Middle East in more detail in order to figure out what the Truth really was. Of course by then I had already figured out that everything I was being told about the Vietnam War also constituted The Big Lie. The same was true for U.S. military intervention into Latin America after the Johnson administration's gratuitous invasion of the Dominican Republic. The same for the pie-in-the-sky "Camelot" peddled by the Kennedy administration after the Bay of Pigs invasion/fiasco and its self-induced Cuban Missile Crisis that was a near-miss for nuclear Armageddon. So I just added the Middle East to the list of international subjects that I needed to pay more attention to in my life. Chicago I entered the University of Chicago as an undergraduate in September of 1968 after having just attended the tumultuous Chicago Democratic Convention. Because of the heavy common-core requirements there, I could not take a course on the Middle East until the next academic year. Then I signed up for a course on "Middle East Politics" taught by Professor Leonard Binder. To his great credit, Professor Binder was most fair and balanced in his presentation of the Palestinian and other Arab claims against Israel during the course of his classroom lectures. In addition, his massive reading list forced me to go through everything then written in English that was favorable to the Palestinian People, as well as reading the standard pro-Israel sources. By the end of Professor Binder's course in the Winter of 1970, I had become convinced of three basic propositions: (1) that the world had inflicted a terrible injustice upon the Palestinian People in 1947-1948; (2) that there will be no peace in the Middle East until this injustice was somehow rectified; and (3) that the Palestinian People were entitled to an independent nation state of their own. I have publicly maintained these positions for the past three decades at great cost to myself. In particular, I have been accused of being everything but a child molester because of my public support for the Palestinian People. I have seen every known principle of Academic Integrity and Academic Freedom violated in order to suppress the basic rights of the Palestinian People. In fact, there is no such thing as Academic Integrity and Academic Freedom in the United States of America when it comes to asserting the rights of the Palestinian People under international law. In any event, the University of Chicago has always had a first-rate Center for Middle East Studies that I have heartily recommended over the years to many prospective students all over the world seeking my advice on where to study that subject. By comparison, Harvard's Center for Middle East Studies was then basically operating as a front organization for the C.I.A. and probably the Mossad as well. No point anyone wasting their time studying Middle East Politics at Harvard. Nevertheless, I entered Harvard in September of 1971 in order to pursue a J.D. at the Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. in Political Science at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Government. The latter was the same doctoral program that had produced Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, and numerous other Machiavellian war-mongers trained by Harvard to "manage" the U.S. global empire. In other words, Harvard trained me to be one of these American Imperial Managers: "There but for the Grace of God go I!" For the next seven years at Harvard I was quite vocal in my support for the Palestinian People, including and especially their basic human rights, their right to self-determination, and their right to an independent nation state of their own. Although I felt like a distinct Minority of One among the Harvard student body at the time, I did receive the support and encouragement for my pro-Palestinian viewpoints from several of my teachers. At the Harvard Law School were Roger Fisher (The Williston Professor of Law), Louis Sohn (Bemis Professor), Richard Baxter (Hudson Professor), Clyde Ferguson (Stimson Professor), and Harold Berman (Ames Professor). At the Government Department was my doctoral dissertation supervisor, Stanley Hoffmann, who has always been most sympathetic to the tragic plight of the Palestinian People. He is now a University Professor- Harvard's highest accolade, and well deserved. While in residence as an Associate at the Harvard Center for International Affairs (CFIA) from 1976-1978, I also came into contact with Walid Khalidi. I was present for the dramatic off-the-record confrontation between him and Shimon Peres at the standing CFIA Seminar on "American Foreign Policy" then conducted by Stanley Hoffmann at their old headquarters on 6 Divinity Avenue. Peres refused to budge even one inch no matter how flexible Khalidi was. A harbinger for the Middle East Peace Negotiations over a decade later. As a most loyal and grateful Harvard alumnus (J.D. magna cum laude, A.M., Ph.D.), I must nevertheless state that it is shameful and shameless that Harvard never granted a tenured full professorship to Walid Khalidi because he is a Palestinian despite the fact that he is universally recognized as one of the world's foremost experts on the Middle East. This gets back to my previous observation that there is no point studying Middle East Politics at Harvard. Walid and I would later meet again at the Middle East Peace Negotiations in Washington, D.C. during the Fall of 1991 Entebbe Lecture Soon after my graduation from Harvard Law School in June of 1976, the very first public Lecture I ever gave was at the invitation of the Harvard International Law Society. I decided to speak on the subject of The Israeli Raid at Entebbe, during which I analyzed many of the legal and political problems surrounding this raid that had just been so unanimously applauded by the U.S. news media. Roger Fisher was kind and gracious enough to show up at this my first public Lecture on anything. He also offered some words of support when I was attacked by another professor for discussing the political motivations behind the Entebbe hijacking by the PFLP. I had expressed my opinion that the PFLP/PLO political claims can, must, and should be negotiated. We even got into a little debate about who was the real "terrorist" here. Obviously, these were not a very popular point of view to take back in the Fall of 1976 at Harvard. Clyde Ferguson would later inform me that my pro-Palestinian viewpoints prevented him from reporting my dossier out of the Harvard Law School Appointments Committee (upon which he then sat) despite his best efforts to get me hired there. In any event, I decided to take my "Entebbe Show" on the road and to use it as my standard job interview lecture in order to get hired somewhere as an Assistant Professor of Law. Not surprisingly, I was rebuffed at the very top law schools. But in December of 1977, I received an offer to become an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, which had just been semi-officially ranked the Number Eleven law school in the country by an American Association of Law Schools Report. So I moved back to Illinois on July 14, 1978 with the hope and expectation that someday I would be able to make a positive contribution to the most desperate plight of the Palestinian People. for sull story, please see: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cia-drugs/message/31782 <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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