Bassam Abu Sharif is a former adviser to Yasser Arafat who was one of the organizers of the series of plane hijackings in 1970 to Jordan. (Time magazine called him "The Face of Terror.")
Sharif is a committed Marxist who admires Mao Zedong and Che Guevara. He is also a conspiracy theorist who claimed that Israel assassinated JFK and Yemenite Jews were going to assassinate President Obama.
Sharif is nervous about how the Arab world is thinking about the Palestinian issue recently.
Abu Sharif: We are facing a war to erase the Palestinian issueBassam Abu Sharif, former political advisor to the late president Yasser Arafat, stressed that the Palestinian people is going through lean years and the hardest stage of the Palestinian struggle, because it is facing a war to erase the Palestinian issue, in the shadow of the worst situation for the political Arab world, the likes of which it has never went through in the history of the Arab nation.He also expressed bitterness at how the Palestinian issue has been sidelined by Egypt specifically.
In an interview with the “Filastin” newspaper yesterday, Abu Sharif said: “The Palestinian people is going through a field that is full of mines, and it must prove that it is attached to its land and has deep roots in it, through working towards returning the (Palestinian) issue to the attention of the Arab nation”.
It is not all bad news, though. He notes that while Arab countries are abandoning the Palestinian issue, he says that there are 15,000 Palestinian academics in the US and many more in Europe who have pushed the issue (he called them "the long arm of the Palestinians."
The Arab world indeed is sick of the Palestinian issue and has started to break with the longstanding reflexive support for whatever the Palestinian leadership demanded. The bad news is that the center of gravity for this support has moved from the Arab world to the so-called liberal universities, where propaganda has replaced actual thought in many cases.
When Arab leaders make more sense than university professors, you know that something is seriously wrong.
(h/t Ibn Boutros)