Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Ben Sisario: “With beats borrowed from Gang Starr and a Tribe Called Quest and lyrics inspired by the Beastie Boys and Tupac Shakur, Israeli rappers express a political urgency not often heard in hip-hop, whether in New York or any of the other corners of the world to which the music has spread.”

It's an interesting article that names a bunch of Israeli (both Arabic and Jewish) rappers and the efforts of the hiphop community to get together for peace, or, in a few cases, increase the confrontation. In a letter to the editor, Diana Buttu (a legal adviser to the PLO) writes that two rappers “one Palestinian, one Israeli, rightly recognize that this is not a conflict between two equals — it is a conflict between an occupier and the people it occupies. It is not surprising that both artists espouse messages of equality and justice; what is surprising is that their voices are not heard.”

Finished reading China and Israel, 1948-1998: A Fifty Year Retrospective edited by Jonathan Goldstein.

William Saletan: “Israel and its critics can't agree which facts to find. The mystery of the Jenin investigation—namely, why a country with nothing to hide would resist a search for truth—dissolves when you realize how much of the battle for public opinion takes place not between truth and falsehood, but between one truth and another. To control the answer, you must control the question. That's the game Israel is playing-and its opponent, the United Nations, is winning.”

Edward W. Said: “Phrases such as 'plucking out the terrorist network,' 'destroying the terrorist infrastructure' and 'attacking terrorist nests' (note the total dehumanization involved) are repeated so often and so unthinkingly that they have given Israel the right to destroy Palestinian civil life, with a shocking degree of sheer wanton destruction, killing, humiliation and vandalism.”

Going through a growing backlog of China News Digest emails, I found this short article by Dong Liu. Chinese support for the Palestinians probably shouldn't have come as much a surprise as it did when I read it. Looking through the online databases (which I have access to for only so long), there's not much scholarly work done on China-PLO relations. Well there's quite a few Beijing Review (state press) articles about it, and three or four scholarly articles on Sino-Middle East relations since Tiananmen Square. So maybe that's where the info lies.

A revealing quote: “Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's secretary general told the Palestinian representative in Beijing that the suicide bomber did not know there were Chinese around.” If Arafat's secretary general knew what the suicide bomber "did not know", the implication is that he may have known where the suicide bomber was going to be, making any condemnation (be it in English or Arabic) a tad suspect.

Aerial Photographs of Jenin from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
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Not an unbiased source, but looks like Jenin wasn't levelled after all. To see some fodder for conspiracy theorists, look at the copyright notice at the bottom.

William Saletan: “Sharon says Palestinian terrorists have been attacking Israel in order to bully him into offering concessions at the bargaining table. Accordingly, he has made the cessation of violence a prerequisite to political talks. By laying down that condition, Sharon thinks he's reasserting Israeli control of the chain of consequences. But the consequence to which he has committed himself—refusing to negotiate—helps the terrorists more than it hurts them. Sharon isn't controlling the terrorists. They're controlling him.”