2008 Woodie Awards
Street theater of the absurd
Max Rosenthal
Issue date: 1/29/03 Section: Commentary
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Dead bodies choked the streets. Soldiers mowed down innocent civilians and aid workers by the hundreds. The evidence of a massive travesty of human rights was hidden in mass graves by an oppressive, racist government.
What is this scene? Rwanda? The killing fields of Cambodia? The Jenin refugee camp? Some may be tempted to agree with the latter, but the answer is in fact far simpler. Instead, the scene above was acted out in Dupont Circle on Saturday night, in a demonstration labeled "Palestinian Street Theater." The event was billed as a re-enactment of Israel's massacre of Palestinians at the Jenin refugee camp last year, but there seemed to be a slight discrepancy: according to everyone but that group of misinformed protesters, no massacre at Jenin ever took place.
Like the anti-war demonstrations on Jan. 18 (where ignorant marchers of various stripes supported a rally organized by a group that has backed, among others, the likes of Kim Jong Il, Slobodan Milosevic and the Tiananmen Square crackdown), Saturday's street theater was rife with major problems. It is issue enough that the demonstrators went to such effort to perpetrate a story that even the United Nations found to be false months ago. It is also issue enough that those same protesters willingly chose to portray Israel and the United States as evil, emotionless killers, trampling the wholly innocent Palestinians while smiling and offering sarcastic jokes. But there was yet another issue that hits far closer to home.
For me, the worst part of Saturday's demonstration was the participation of several Georgetown students and faculty members. Now, I understand and fully support the right of every person to his own opinion. While I took issue with the views of the group, I question neither their right to have them nor to express them for the world to see.
Yet, these people should be truly ashamed of themselves. The scene they chose to re-enact was refuted as a propaganda myth by every reputable news source and international body on the face of the earth. A loudspeaker narrating the action claimed that Israeli soldiers slaughtered thousands of innocents and shot at aid workers and reporters trying to sneak into the camp, using rather dubious "diary entries" as evidence of atrocities. The clumsy claim that American funding was directly responsible for the killings was repeated by the narrators, painted on the sides of cardboard tanks, and posted on signs with alarming frequency.
What is this scene? Rwanda? The killing fields of Cambodia? The Jenin refugee camp? Some may be tempted to agree with the latter, but the answer is in fact far simpler. Instead, the scene above was acted out in Dupont Circle on Saturday night, in a demonstration labeled "Palestinian Street Theater." The event was billed as a re-enactment of Israel's massacre of Palestinians at the Jenin refugee camp last year, but there seemed to be a slight discrepancy: according to everyone but that group of misinformed protesters, no massacre at Jenin ever took place.
Like the anti-war demonstrations on Jan. 18 (where ignorant marchers of various stripes supported a rally organized by a group that has backed, among others, the likes of Kim Jong Il, Slobodan Milosevic and the Tiananmen Square crackdown), Saturday's street theater was rife with major problems. It is issue enough that the demonstrators went to such effort to perpetrate a story that even the United Nations found to be false months ago. It is also issue enough that those same protesters willingly chose to portray Israel and the United States as evil, emotionless killers, trampling the wholly innocent Palestinians while smiling and offering sarcastic jokes. But there was yet another issue that hits far closer to home.
For me, the worst part of Saturday's demonstration was the participation of several Georgetown students and faculty members. Now, I understand and fully support the right of every person to his own opinion. While I took issue with the views of the group, I question neither their right to have them nor to express them for the world to see.
Yet, these people should be truly ashamed of themselves. The scene they chose to re-enact was refuted as a propaganda myth by every reputable news source and international body on the face of the earth. A loudspeaker narrating the action claimed that Israeli soldiers slaughtered thousands of innocents and shot at aid workers and reporters trying to sneak into the camp, using rather dubious "diary entries" as evidence of atrocities. The clumsy claim that American funding was directly responsible for the killings was repeated by the narrators, painted on the sides of cardboard tanks, and posted on signs with alarming frequency.