August 18, 2005

HANAN ASHRAWI: A MODERATE? UNTIL SHE REACHES FOR HER KALASHNIKOV

A couple of nights ago Horsefeathers’ EuroWatch Reporter caught Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” examination of the events in Gaza concluding with an interview with Hanan Ashrawi, whom Koppel repeatedly referred to during the interview as a “moderate.” Here, forthwith, are our reporter’s notes:

“Ashrawi is indeed an expert at getting influential journalists to describe her in whatever way she chooses to portray herself at a given moment.

“Ashrawi’s father was one of the founders of the PLO and while she often portrays herself as a Palestinian, she was actually born in Lebanon. And because she has a Ph.D. in medieval literature from the University of Virginia, the American press is always careful to address her as Dr. Ashrawi and to emphasize her faculty status at Bir Zeit University.

“What the mainstream American press has forgotten, however, is her role in the late sixties and seventies when she appeared proudly in photographs as keffiyah-wearing, Kalashnikov-slinging, and “non-moderate.” At that time, her great and good friend, German pundit Rudolf Augstein (a notorious womanizer and champion of anyone who killed Jews and Americans), provided much coverage for her in his highly-regarded weekly news magazine “Der Spiegel.” No one in the journalistic world knows how to exploit and re-use photo-ops like the Germans.

“The fact of the matter is that the mainstream German press openly promoted and supported global terrorism in the 1970s and early 1980s, devoting much space to the depiction of such questionable characters as Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and their cohorts as romantic, attractive, and courageous freedom-fighters. The Ashrawi stories, were Augstein’s attempt to help her reinvent herself as a soft-spoken, solid person who now has journalists describing her as a “moderate.”

“Ashrawi’s relationship with Peter Jennings from her days as a student in Beirut is thought by many to have been responsible for Jennings’ smirking coverage of the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes at Munich. It engendered outrage at that time on the part of commentators closely watching the way in which the events were portrayed to the American public.”