Once again, Peres does the twist
September 27, 2005
New York (AP) [The Perescope's comments are bracketed in green] In a New York college class, the MTV camera and all eyes were on the door, awaiting the professor – a surprise.
In walked Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres.
"I am your surprise," the 82-year-old Nobel Prize winner, cracking a smile, told the undergraduate students at New York University [one wonders whether he said the same thing to Arafat in Oslo in 1993].
The result was a taped-for-MTV discussion of the world's troubles [many of which were caused by Peres's own diplomatic mismanagement], with Peres telling the politics majors that the biggest achievement of the past century was the liberation of women [I guess that means he's finally stopped peddling his long-standing idiotic claim that his Oslo Accords were the greatest thing since he invented Swiss cheese].
The session is to air September 27 on MTV's college targeted network, mtvU, which pipes student-aimed programming onto more than 700 US campuses, as well as the cable channel's public Web site.
When questions-and-answers time came, Peres was peppered with queries about everything from how he felt when the Palestinian flag was raised over Gaza after Israeli settlers left, to whether Israelis and Palestinians could live side by side.
Stay tuned for the answers, when the class airs on MTV's year-old channel, whose other fill-in professors at various colleges have included rocker Marilyn Manson, author Tom Wolfe, rapper Nas, Arizona Sen. John McCain and singer Sting.
Peres ended with a zinger, telling students that "America is the big Satan, and Israel is the little Satan" – that is, according to the leaders of Iran, whose government Peres said is run by "a secret, sacred group of ayatollahs" he called "killers." [Peres used to call Arafat and his ilk "killers" before Oslo, too. Does that mean that Peres is now holding clandestine talks with the Iranians? Or does it mean that Peres has finally learned the lesson of his Oslo mistake -- that there can be no compromise with those who call for your eradication. Unfortunately, no one asked him to fess up.]
This hardly resembled the class advertised to students to hide the surprise – a session devoted to making "a promotional video for incoming freshmen." Still, 21-year-old Stephen Gallo was nonplussed by the highpower politician.
"It's an insider view of the Middle East," said the senior. "I didn't learn anything I didn't already know [we never learn anything new from listening to Peres babble, either, Stephen, so don't take it personally]. But he's a Nobel Prize winner, and there have been a lot worse peace prize winners, like Yasser Arafat" [and, perchance, did Peres mention who it was who made Arafat's ignominious Nobel Prize possible by sanitizing him and negotiating with him in Oslo?].
