Thursday, November 11, 2004

The Iron Law of Generosity

from A Tiny Revolution
The death of Yasser Arafat is a good time to bring up one of my favorite subjects: geopolitical generosity.

After the peace talks at Camp David ended in 2000 without an agreement, everyone in the US media starting talking about how Arafat had inexplicably turned down Israel's "generous offer." For instance, here's Charles Krauthammer:

At Camp David, Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians an astonishingly generous peace with dignity and statehood. Arafat not only turned it down, he refused even to make a counter offer!

At the time, I didn't know exactly what had happened at Camp David. But hearing about Israeli generosity, I thought -- oh man, the poor Palestinians. That's because of what I call the Iron Law of Generosity: whenever one group of people talks about being "generous" to another, it means they're BEATING THE CRAP OUT OF THEM.

Take Andrew Jackson. Here's what Jackson said in a famous address to Congress in 1830...

1 comment:

Sheryl said...

The only thing he left out was how generous we have been to the Iraqis. :(