Linda Grant on sorry recruitment
Over at Norm's Blog, Linda Grant captures a perspective it took me a while when younger to grasp.Kuntar fits no model of the impoverished refugee driven to despair by occupation. Nor can he be seen within the context of Iranian-backed Islamism. When he emerged from prison last week it was as a relic of a bygone age: of that era of self-appointed middle-class revolutionaries, like the Weather Underground and Baader-Meinhof Gang.
...
Drawn to political organizations of the far left and far right, they are people who have the passion and the excitement for violence, the glamour of violence. Those who are motivated by a desire for the alleviation of poverty or the redressing of injustice, lack the thirst for blood.
This remains the great problem in the Middle East - the prominence of the cult of death ("Viva la Muerte!") among the Palestinians (including Fatah) and in Lebanon. It is the Bonnie and Clyde approach to 'rebellion'.
There is no chance for civil society where Kuntar is lionized as a a hero.
And while the Weather Underground may be relics of a bygone era, you can expect some of those relics to play a visible role, and rightly, I think, in the upcoming US Presidential Campaign. (Well, at least until slick Barry tosses Dohrn and Ayers under the train too - I think he has tried but not in convincing enough ways yet.)
(Disclosure: I continue to be most likely to cast my foreigner's virtual meaningless vote to Obama, but the currency is sinking fast. Lucky for Obama the competition is not so great at the moment.)
Labels: death cult, Lebanon, murder, palestine
posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:04 PM
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