Diana Butto is a Palestinian-Canadian "legal advisor". She has also appeared on the itinerary of the UC-Irvine Olive Tree Initiative. Here is an interview she did with Fox's Greg Jarrett during the fighting in Gaza.
Clearly, Ms Butto is a propagandist for the Palestinian side. She accuses Israel of committing war crimes with US weaponry. She pooh-poohs the fact that Hamas was lobbing rockets into southern Israel and using civilians as shields . To his credit, Jarrett dismisses her claims with the contempt she deserves.
Diana Butto is also a participant in the much-ballyhooed Olive Tree Initiative at UC-Irvine and her name appears on the group's 2008 itinerary when they visited the Holy Land. She is a firece anti-Israel activist and supports the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement against the Jewish state.
http://collegelife.freedomblogging.com/official-itinerary-for-uci-olive-tree-initiative-student-trip-2008/
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It's odd and I assume it is a typo but the first couple of days in the agenda are in September, '08 and the rest are in September, '07.
Anyway, it is typical of the propagandists (and the MSU students) that they are absolutely certain of their "facts" and call any alternative explanation "lies". I have even had students tell me that maps (!) of the Middle East are lies. They earnestly believe that Israel is much larger than it appears on a world map.
It is hard for anyone who hasn't been to the Middle East to have a dialogue with any of them because they are so convinced of their alternate universe facts ... even though they themselves have never been there. They always seem to have some relative who has told them of something.
This seems to be part of the Muslim tradition of taqiyah, basically lying or deception which is apparently condoned when it is in the service of Islam. It was the same phenomena when the MSU students claimed the disruptions of the Israeli ambassador's address at UCI were all spontaneous. Here you see this lady doing the exact same thing. The value of truthfulness is just not that high in their culture.
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She is obviously wrong. More accurately, she is an advocate for one side of a conflict. Like most advocates, from Angela Davis to Sarah Palin, she dismisses inconvenient truths, and plays up whatever facts can be construed favorably to the position she advocates. Most advocates also lie when they think they can get away with it, or deem it useful to do so.
The problem with most "analysis," including what is posted here about Butto, is that it consigns people to blocs, led by such characters. We need to pay more attention to Sun Tzu's The Art of War. In particular, the way to prepare for, to win, or to head off, a conflict, is to peel the adversaries adherents and allies away from their banner, not to roundly denounce adversaries in ways that reinforce the loyalties of adherents and allies.
Incidentally, the same is true of the rabid denunciations of "the Tea Party" from various sources. Sixty to seventy percent of those who checked out "the Tea Party" could have been won to another platform, but not by loud-mouthed denunications referring to them all wholesale as "right wing ideologues." That's why I don't donate to the Democratic National Committee, even though the vacuum of rational thought in the Republican Party leaves me little choice but to vote for Democrats.
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