Ted Turner - Supporting the Palestinian People!

[PunkRawker677]

I just heard the news. Ted Turner made a comment to a European news paper that said that the palestinian people are fighting with suicide bombers because they lack the proper ammunition and weaponry to fight a proper war.. check it out..

[Blasphemy]

oh, makes me cry. they really don't want to brutally slaughter an innocent 10 years-old girl, but they just have no choice. i really pity them.

[truthaddict11]

fuck ted turner! if he really wanted to support palestine his companies wouldnt be the propgandous bullshit they are

[Hattori Hanzo]

hey, blasphemy- what happened november 4th?

[Blasphemy]

http://www.che-lives.com/cgi/community/top...um=17&topic=795 (http://www.che-lives.com/cgi/community/topic.pl?forum=17&topic=795)

[PunkRawker677]

okay everyone.. i wasnt supporting ted turnur.. i was supporting his comment.. big big big difference.. and while your wonderful troops (directed at blasphemy) are savagly mass murdering palestinians, its more important to bring into light the very very few children killed by palestinians compared to those massive amounts killed by israelis

[j]

Punkrawker and Blasphemy please don't degenerate this into another Palestine is right, no Israel is right debate. Suicide bombings are aweful, they kill innocents. Israeli atrocities against civilians just as aweful. No one here will deny that (if you do you are truly sick). I think the point here is that wrongs by Palenstine get more press and notriety than wrongs by Israel. I believe that is why Punk Rawker posted this.



As for Ted Turner. Who really cares? The damn cappie pig probably has no real understanding of the conflict and is repeating what someone else has said.

j

[I Will Deny You]

Turner is probably just trying to get a little more credibility with the Left, since we all got pissed at him because of the Tomahawk Chop. Also, without Jane he has less clout with us.

Lindsay

[RedCeltic]

Quote: from I Will Deny You on 10:24 pm on June 18, 2002
Turner is probably just trying to get a little more credibility with the Left, since we all got pissed at him because of the Tomahawk Chop. Also, without Jane he has less clout with us.

Lindsay

ALL HAIL HANOI JANE! my dad had a hard time going to the bathroom when she was at her most hated satus, jerks would put targets in the urinals with her photo on them.

(Edited by RedCeltic at 10:45 pm on June 18, 2002)

[guerrillaradio]

I don't think any Americans are very well placed to discuss this, as they haven't read the whole article. I have, it was in The Guardian, Britain's only real left-wing broadsheet, and it was quite an eye-opener. Personally, I don't think he sounds that bad. Maybe CNN's pretty fucked, but Turner appears to have some sense. Here's a couple of extracts from the interview:

'Turner brought the wrath of America upon himself by telling students in a speech in Rhode Island that the September 11 hijackers had been "brave". He was stung into silence. "Where's the upside in opening your mouth?" he says now, scissoring himself into an armchair overlooking the city, the shelves behind him crammed with more than 140 plaques and trophies. "It's kinda nice to keep quiet at a time when everybody else is telling everybody what to do."

Instead, he threw himself into his charity work, which is dizzying stuff in itself: he pledged $1bn to the UN in 1997 and helped pay off the $34m it was owed by the US in 2000. Turner's UN Foundation, the biggest of his three charities, recently spent $22.2m in one month combating intestinal parasites in Vietnamese children, reducing China's greenhouse-gas emissions and helping women from Burkina Faso start businesses selling nut butter.

Nigel Pritchard, CNN's head of international public relations, who is sitting beside me, has prepared a memo outlining some things his boss might like to consider not saying. Craning my neck, I see that it politely suggests that he might steer clear of talking about AOL Time Warner, the company resulting from the merger of the internet firm AOL with the company that Turner Broadcasting was already part of. And, specifically, he might like to avoid reference to that Rhode Island speech. Nigel is only doing his job, but I suspect that he knows this part of it was never going to be very effective: Turner is notorious for doing as he pleases. Early in his career, he made a pitch wearing no clothes to advertising executives; later, he caused controversy by travelling to Cuba to get Fidel Castro to tape a promotional slot for CNN.'

***

'Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, is reported to have thought that Turner was playing a prank when he offered to spend $1bn on the beleaguered organisation. Nothing could have been further from the truth: in his various world-saving projects - everything from preventing the extinction of the Chiricahua leopard frog in the wilds of New Mexico to founding an influential nuclear non-proliferation institute - Turner really does seem to see himself as locked in a personal, elemental battle against apocalypse. "I'm doing everything I can to try and avert disaster while we kind of give us a little time to get our act together, because in time we'll have to do it," he says. "Either that, or, you know... it's goodbye." He doesn't just give money: his staff are sometimes taken aback to see him skulking in the streets nearby, picking up litter.'

***

'But right now, aren't the Israelis and the Palestinians both terrorising each other?" he says, as Pritchard starts scribbling furiously on his notepad. "It looks to me like they're both doing it. When the Brits retaliated for the Germans, for the, awwww, Krauts... for the Nazis bombing London by bombing Berlin, weren't you both terrorising each other? The rich and the powerful, they don't need to resort to terrorism... The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers; that's all they have. The Israelis... they've got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism."

But Pritchard is writing at warp speed now, and there has always been a part of Turner that wants to please everyone, including his worried public-relations staff. "The United States, I think," he says, pulling himself together, "would probably not be considered a terrorist example at the current time."

It must get depressing, I say, to dedicate so much time to issues that seem to have faded from the agenda. And so much money: when Turner gave his first billion to the UN, he dropped 67 places on the Forbes 500 rich list, out of the top 10 for ever. (His fortune now stands at $3.8bn.) Even with his resources, he must feel powerless now compared with when he sat astride the world's biggest media conglomerate. Does he ever feel hopeless? "I remember, many years ago, at the height of the cold war, I was down the Amazon with [the explorer] Jacques Cousteau, and I had a hopeless thought, and I said, 'Jacques, I don't think we're gonna make it.' And he said, 'What difference does it make? What else can we do?' "

Then he is suddenly quiet. "It is depressing," he says softly. "The Middle East, the environment, all these things - it is depressing." He turns his head away and his lips start pursing and unpursing, mashing his moustache. The skin around his eyes turns red, and he blinks, and it becomes apparent that Ted Turner is crying. "It is depressing," he says again.

But it lasts only moments, and he is soon arching forward again, outlining his solutions. One of these has always been a spirited internationalism that can seem a little goofy these days - the simple benefits of getting to know your enemies instead of raising the barricades against them. CNN gained a reputation in parts of Europe as a sinister force of American imperialism, but in fact it has always dripped with this let's-all-get-along ethic, and Turner says his greatest pleasure, back when he had full control of the channel, was in "ordering them to cover this or that UN conference from gavel to gavel".'

Opinions people??