'JPost Classic': A.M. Rosenthal foresaw Arab world unrest

A multimedia feature with classic audio excerpts from interviews with leading US, Israeli personalities over last two decades.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
JPost.com is happy to launch its new “JPost Classic” segment, a weekly multimedia feature showcasing classic audio excerpts from speeches and interviews with top thinkers and decision makers.
In this inaugural clip from 2001, the former New York Times executive editor and columnist, A.M. Rosenthal foresees the spectacle of angry protesters now unfolding from Tunisia to Egypt to Lebanon.
“Only in the Middle East have the Arab countries and other Muslim countries been strong enough—and the people weak enough—so that the despotism remained,” Rosenthal told interviewer Mordechai Twersky on Jerusalem Post Radio’s “Newsmakers” program. “I think that very soon it will be begin to occur to the people of the Middle East [that] the horrors of what their leaders are doing.”
The interview with Rosenthal, who died in 2006, was broadcast one day after 15 Israelis were killed in a terrorist bombing aboard Egged bus no. 16 in Haifa.
In the interview, Rosenthal, who served as a columnist at the time for the New York Daily News, called for the removal of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, an “episode,” as he called it, that would “have an effect on the Palestinian people.”
“They will see what the people of other despotisms in all over the world already see, that their leaders bring them nothing but blood and hunger,” Rosenthal said. “And I do not think they will stay with that forever.”
In the coming days and weeks, “JPost Classic” will feature excerpts from interviews with leading American and Israeli personalities spanning the last two decades.