"But when he unfolded a map that showed a Palestinian state made up of several unconnected cantons surrounded by Israeli troops, Arafat walked away."

The simple fact is, he did. Mike Shuster's report is accurate.

As I said—and as NPR reported—the intransigence of both sides led to the breakdown of the talks. Since they had reached an impasse, one of the two sides was going to blink first, and it was Arafat. But the NPR reports made it very plain that Arafat was not solely to blame for the breakdown of the talks. It was the bull-headedness of both parties.

In an interview with Bob Edwards, Shuster goes on to say, "Over the past century of conflict, it has always been hard for the two sides to perceive a path to peace. The great irony of the past decade is that almost like equal poles of a magnet, the closer the Israelis and Palestinians came to each other, the more violently they pulled away."

Now, did Shuster "lie?" Or did he give a pretty accurate report?

One might peruse THIS.

A rather telling paragraph here, excerpted from THIS analysis:

These compromises notwithstanding, the Palestinians never managed to rid themselves of their intransigent image. Indeed, the Palestinians' principal failing is that from the beginning of the Camp David summit onward they were unable either to say yes to the American ideas or to present a cogent and specific counterproposal of their own. In failing to do either, the Palestinians denied the US the leverage it felt it needed to test Barak's stated willingness to go the extra mile and thereby provoked the President's anger. When Abu Ala'a, a leading Palestinian negotiator, refused to work on a map to negotiate a possible solution, arguing that Israel first had to concede that any territorial agreement must be based on the line of June 4, 1967, the President burst out, "Don't simply say to the Israelis that their map is no good. Give me something better!" When Abu Ala'a again balked, the President stormed out: "This is a fraud. It is not a summit. I won't have the United States covering for negotiations in bad faith. Let's quit!" Toward the end of the summit, an irate Clinton would tell Arafat: "If the Israelis can make compromises and you can't, I should go home. You have been here fourteen days and said no to everything. These things have consequences; failure will mean the end of the peace process.... Let's let hell break loose and live with the consequences."

And then, there is this from aljazeera.net archives.

And then again, there is "CAMERA: the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America." [You can look it up yourself. I'm getting tired of making links, and I do have other things to do with my time.] They take the administration (any administration) and all of the American news services, including NPR and PBS, to task for their "blatantly pro-Israeli, anti-Palestinian bias."

If you give an accurate report of what really happened, you're bound to tick somebody off.

Don Firth