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I'm not sure whether I'm one of the purveyors of
'leftist crap' or not, but it might be worth mentioning that, some years ago, I
would without hesitation have described everything covered by this forum as
crap. BDNow didn't convert me from this view, - I reached it with help
from my wife, reading and a short course at Emerson College - but it
has filled out my understanding of many issues enormously.
I'm reassured that the majority who have
commented on 'political postings' have found them interesting and don't want
them abolished.
My views on the situation in Israel/Palestine are
coloured by the fact that I've been to numerous Middle Eastern countries and
have supervised the work of many Arab postgrads (although I've known and liked
many Jewish people, not necessarily Zionists, however). To take an extreme
example, Saddam Hussein is now represented to us as a monster (let's
remember that he was a valued ally only a few years ago); but one of my
Iraqi students came from a peasant family. Thanks to the Ba'athist regime,
he was well educated, got a degree at a local university, was funded to come to
Britain for his doctorate and now holds a good position in a research
institution back in Iraq (as a marine biologist, not a developer of
weapons). His opinion of Saddam might be slightly different from
ours. If the excerpt from Will Hutton's new book 'The World We're In'
(quoted in my Sunday newspaper) is to be believed, it would not now be possible
for an equivalent US American to achieve this. What might my Iraqi
conclude from this comparison
? Tony
N-S.
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