codshit.com: My Meeting with Arafat

Wednesday 14 May 2003

My Meeting with Arafat

"Isn't He Irrelevant? Finished?"

by Uri Avnery

"Have you gone mad? Now? He is irrelevant! He's finished!" These were the reactions of some people when Israeli TV showed my meeting with Arafat in Ramallah this week.

Is Arafat "finished"? If so, he has not heard about it. I found him in splendid shape. At some of my meetings with him over the last few years he frequently looked tired, even distant and self-absorbed. This time he was in good spirits. He talked energetically, reacted rapidly, poked gentle fun at his assistants and made some biting remarks.

(For example: when we spoke about Sharon's demand that Abu-Mazen conduct mass arrests, he laughed: "But the Israelis have destroyed all our prisons, except the one in Jericho. And if we want to transfer a criminal there, we must ask the Quartet for a car, so as to be able to pass the Israeli checkpoints!")

One can understand his lively mood. For the last year, his life has been hanging on a thread. Sharon could have sent his men to kill him at any moment. (Several times this danger seemed so close that my friends and I found it necessary to rush there as a human shield.) One of the Israeli officers boasted this week that "only a thin wall separated me from him." Now this danger has been rendered more remote --even if Arafat is still confined to his small building, amid surrealistic ruins.

During the last 45 years, his life has been in danger many times. Dozens of attempts have been made on his life. Once his airplane crash landed, killing several of his entourage. He survived it all. This time, too. His sense of relief is understandable.

Full story...

Enlightenment

Do you feel like you're living in some Orwellian nightmare? Or perhaps you feel as if you're plugged into The Matrix? Well if so, you've come to the right place. No matter how messed up you thought the world was, by the time you've finished reading some of the things I've found on my travels in Cyberspace you'll realise that 1984 was just a typo!

A note to the non-ravers out there: codshit is NOT a derogatory or insulting term and bears no relation in offensiveness to its four-letter cousin, it's a word used to describe the nonsense that people sometimes talk when they are off their heads. To understand what codshit is watch the film Human Traffic.

Comments are welcome, but before you waste perfectly useful energy abusing me please take a moment to reflect on the basic right we all have to express ourselves!

Please remember that I am not telling you what to think or believe, take everything you read here with a large grain of salt!

Wisdom

Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'...they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git'....
.: Alexi Sayle :.

If you confront the Universe with good intentions in your heart it will reflect that and reward your intent... usually... It just doesn't always do it in the way you expect.
.: G'kar :.

So there, we have figured it out, go back to bed America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed America, your government is in control again. Here, here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed America, here's American Gladiators. Here's 56 channels of it. Watch these pituitary retards bang their fuckin skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go America, you are free... to do as we tell you.
.: Bill Hicks :.

Let there be no doubt that the people of the free world are engaged in a war... In the next few years, we are either going to see the people of the free world rise up against these fascists, now setting the stage for global war, or we are going to see the end of democracy as we know it with martial law the end result.
.: David Shayler :.

Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
.: Albert Einstein :.

Wisdom