Aziz Dweik is the the Hamas-nominated Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council. I'd say they could do with someone better as a spokesperson if the report of this conversation is anything to go by:
They [the Israelis] should know better. The Nazis tried to erase them and they survived. Now they try to erase us and we will survive. They of all people should know you can't erase a people.Note the repeated usage of 'erase' there. Some slippage, no? Then there's this:
The idea, he says, that Palestinians are all ignorant terrorists is a lie cooked up by the Israelis and the Bush Administration.I'd be interested to see the evidence for the claim that 'the Israelis' and the Bush Administration present all Palestinians as ignorant terrorists. There have been acts of terrorism from Palestinians, some of these carried out by Hamas; that is a rather more specific claim and it is incontrovertibly true. Here is how Dweik deals with the fact:
OK, yes, it happened, we did suicide attacks but now there is a truce. We deplore any action where civilians are killed, yes, including Israeli civilians. We are a moderate Islamic movement. We are not terrorists. We are freedom seekers. Please, tell your readers, please help us secure this goal.The good news here - provisionally - is that he presents this as a stable as well as new state of affairs: freedom seekers, not terrorists, and they deplore the killing of civilians, including Israelis (though it would be good to know if the deploring is retroactive). A reason for caution about it is this: 'now there is a truce'. That sounds less definitive. There are more precise ways of speaking than PLC Speaker Aziz Dweik manages. (Via Tim Blair.)