Re “Buttu Is a Surprise”
A main reason Diana Buttu, former legal advisor to Yasser Arafat, surprised me and perhaps the crowd Sunday at the Culver-Palms United Methodist Church was her willingness to criticize the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his and his dead-in-the-water joke of a government.
Abbas has a government the way a farmer in Mobile, Al, does.
Ms. Buttu was clear and controllably passionate in her beliefs:
Israel is the single villain in decades of peace talks, she declared unequivocally. “Settlers” in Israel have ruined the talks.
But the Palestinians have dirty hands, she confessed forthrightly and unqualifiedly.
That was the major takeaway from her brief speech followed that was followed by well-informed questions.
Let’s make a U-turn and dwell momentarily on her opening gambit, Abbas’s drearily recycled sort-of bombast at the U.N. last Friday when he pleaded to be recognized as an authentic sovereign state.
