Hyperreality

Not the person you're replying to, but I've lived in both the Netherlands and the UK.

My experience is that the UK is far more in denial about the crimes of empire than the Netherlands.

Most European countries have a shameful colonial history. Many haven't fully come to terms with it.

Why aren't they reporting on this in western media?!!1! /s

They think they sell beer. They sell the bottles.

Here's a later one:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fcamp-david-summit-2000-israeli-palestinian-peace-proposal-v0-bf0sjyatcel81.jpg%3Fs%3D12050f876bf8f3c65ff49c0e5fa3cbe81f6070df

Point being that, depending on who you ask, Arafat decided to stop negotiating. Something Prince Bandar labelled criminal.

Rightly or wrongly, many Israelis seem to have come to the conclusion that any proposal would never be enough. Maybe the Palestinians could have gotten more out of it, it was clear that the Israeli PM was desperate to sign a deal, because he knew his future was riding on it. Arafat gained in popularity for taking a hard line. Israeli PM Barak predictably lost popularity and the election, because many Israelis thought he had gone too far.

Middle-East Eye:

MEE has been accused of being backed by Qatar. The governments of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt and Bahrain accuse MEE of pro-Muslim Brotherhood bias and receiving Qatari funding. As a consequence, they demanded MEE to be shut down following the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar. ... On 20 October 2022, MEE cut ties with Palestinian journalist Shatha Hammad after it was discovered that she made a Facebook post in 2014 which praised Adolf Hitler for "sharing the same ideology"

Al Jazeera:

... Officials of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party ... accused Al-Jazeera of bias toward Hamas (with which it is at political loggerheads), and Fatah official Mohammed Dahlan sued the broadcaster. ... On 15 July of that year [2009], the Palestinian National Authority (PA) closed down Al Jazeera's offices in the West Bank in an apparent response to claims made on the channel by Farouk Kaddoumi that PA president Mahmoud Abbas had been involved in the death of Yasser Arafat. The Palestinian Information Ministry called the organization's coverage "unbalanced" and accused it of incitement against the PLO and the PA. Four days later, Abbas rescinded the ban and allowed Al Jazeera to resume operations ... Al Jazeera reporters and anchors in London, Paris, Moscow, Beirut and Cairo have resigned. Ali Hashem, the organization's Shia Beirut correspondent, resigned after leaked emails publicized his discontent with Al Jazeera's "unprofessional" and biased coverage of the Syrian civil war at the expense of the 2011 Bahraini uprising. Since the Bahrain government was supported by the Gulf Cooperation Council (of which Qatar is a member), the protests were given less prominence than the Syrian conflict on the network. Longtime Berlin correspondent Aktham Suliman left in late 2012, saying that he felt he was no longer allowed to work as an independent journalist ... Al Jazeera faced criticism from Bangladeshi human rights activists ...accused of downplaying the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, in which Islamist militias assisted the Pakistan Army in targeting Bengalis ... demanded a ban on Al Jazeera transmission within Bangladesh citing similar bans in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan and the UAE.

... Critics say in past years, Al-Jazeera — particularly its flagship Arabic channel — has reflected Qatari policy by promoting Islamist movements. Many of the region’s Arab rulers, particularly in Egypt and the UAE, see the Muslim Brotherhood group and its offshoots as a top threat. ... Al-Jazeera’s English and Arabic channels, as well as its news websites and its popular online AJ+ videos, do not mirror one another in style and target different audiences.

Qatar:

Qatar is Hamas' most important financial backer and foreign ally. Qatari Emir Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani was the first state leader to visit the Hamas government in 2012. So far, the emirate has transferred €1.5 billion ($1.8 billion) to Hamas

And:

While ordinary Palestinians suffer and die in Gaza, Hamas leaders live in comfort 2,000 km away ... as Hamas gunmen rampaged across southern Israel .... Hamas leaders ... recorded themselves showing surprise about the attacks from the news on a large-screen television, and then kneeling to give thanks to Allah for the success of the operation. ... "To be clear, the Qatari government has genuine and real sympathy for the Palestinian cause,"

And:

Qatar’s dalliance with Islamist groups has long been the primary means for Doha to project influence in the Arab world, particularly through state support for Al Jazeera Arabic. After 2011, Qatar came to believe, and Al Jazeera Arabic confidently predicted, that a wave of Islamist governance would sweep in with new Arab democracies. Instead, the elected Brotherhood government in Egypt proved even more unpopular than the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship ... With the Brotherhood’s decline in prestige and power, Qatar’s bet has yielded precious few returns. And now Hamas’s disastrous rebranding in Western eyes could well force a reckoning with Doha’s irresponsible strategy.

Here's the clip. It's from the morning after they've had sex:

https://youtu.be/SYTTQHsYNWQ?t=140

It did. Quality also improved drastically, but it was too late to avoid the axe. Finale wasn't great though.

Same thing in the Netherlands. There's a common misconception that farmers are poor small landowners, who care for nature and the natural landscape.

Those are long gone or incredibly rare. What's left is large landowners from (quasi-)aristocratic families or large corporations, hoarding their wealth and land. Often they hire foreign workers to do the actual work, treating them badly in the process. And pollution. So much pollution.

There's more than enough blame to go around on the failure of negotiations, depending on who you believe. For example:

Clinton blamed Arafat after the failure of the talks, stating, "I regret that in 2000 Arafat missed the opportunity to bring that nation into being and pray for the day when the dreams of the Palestinian people for a state and a better life will be realized in a just and lasting peace." The failure to come to an agreement was widely attributed to Yasser Arafat, as he walked away from the table without making a concrete counter-offer and because Arafat did little to quell the series of Palestinian riots that began shortly after the summit. Arafat was also accused of scuttling the talks by Nabil Amr, a former minister in the Palestinian Authority. In My Life, Clinton wrote that Arafat once complimented Clinton by telling him, "You are a great man." Clinton responded, "I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you made me one."

Dennis Ross, the US Middle East envoy and a key negotiator at the summit, summarized his perspectives in his book The Missing Peace. During a lecture in Australia, Ross suggested that the reason for the failure was Arafat's unwillingness to sign a final deal with Israel that would close the door on any of the Palestinians' maximum demands, particularly the right of return. Ross claimed that what Arafat really wanted was "a one-state solution. Not independent, adjacent Israeli and Palestinian states, but a single Arab state encompassing all of Historic Palestine". Ross also quoted Saudi Prince Bandar as saying while negotiations were taking place: "If Arafat does not accept what is available now, it won't be a tragedy; it will be a crime."

In his book, The Oslo Syndrome, Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry and historian Kenneth Levin summarized the failure of the 2000 Camp David Summit in this manner: "despite the dimensions of the Israeli offer and intense pressure from President Clinton, Arafat demurred. He apparently was indeed unwilling, no matter what the Israeli concessions, to sign an agreement that declared itself final and forswore any further Palestinian claims."[38] Levin argues that both the Israelis and the Americans were naive in expecting that Arafat would agree to give up the idea of a literal "right of return" for all Palestinians into Israel proper no matter how many 1948 refugees or how much monetary compensation Israel offered to allow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Camp_David_Summit

I have watched too much porn.

It's weird how drama free kbin seems to be. Perhaps because we're still smaller