That's the term applied by the Wall Street Journal to Omar Karsou, who has been brave enough to demand reforms in Arafat's mafia-governance style. The 42-year old banker is also the founder of "Democracy in Palestine." The group's mission: to promote a true "rule of law" in the PA; to promote national and local elections in the PA; and to demand a renunciation of the use of force in settling disputes.
I remain somewhat skeptical of the "Mandela" designation, but there is little doubt that Karsou's movement is a positive step forward in many ways. On that basis alone, he's worth our attention... and I agree with The Journal that some level of diplomatic protection would also be a good idea.
Leave a comment
Here are some quick tips for adding simple Textile formatting to your comments, though you can also use proper HTML tags:
*This* puts text in bold.
_This_ puts text in italics.
bq. This "bq." at the beginning of a paragraph, flush with the left hand side and with a space after it, is the code to indent one paragraph of text as a block quote.
To add a live URL, "Text to display":http://windsofchange.net/ (no spaces between) will show up as Text to display. Always use this for links - otherwise you will screw up the columns on our main blog page.