The radicalism of youth <http://slate.msn.com/InterNatPapers/01-01-08/InterNatPapers.asp> Is it too soon to add this to German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's rap sheet? The former student radical, who acknowledged last week that 1973 photographs showing him beating a cop were authentic (the photos can be seen here, <http://www.faz.com/IN/INtemplates/eFAZ/archive.asp?doc={6F9B4A4B-E3D2-11D4-B99E-009027BA226C}> courtesy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), has now been confronted about his possible involvement in a more serious attack on a policeman. Britain's Sunday Times reported that Fischer was arrested in May 1976 on suspicion of attempted murder after demonstrators threw a Molotov cocktail into a car, severely burning a police officer, and that some police files on the minister's activist years have disappeared from their archives. While Fischer is embarrassed by the revelations from his radical youth, in Britain two prominent members of the Labor government are parading their activist histories with pride. Writing in the Guardian, Foreign Office minister Peter Hain, who was a militant anti-apartheid crusader in the 1970s, invoked his past <http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,418441,00.html> to justify his current campaign to maintain sanctions against Iraq: "They simply want us to abandon Saddam's victims to their fate. This sounds to me like the kind of appeasement of oppression I fought against in my anti-apartheid days and am fighting against today in my opposition to Saddam Hussein's brutality." In the Sunday Times, Britain's first black government minister, Paul Boateng, who "made his name as a fiery critic of the police and legal adviser to the campaign against black youths being stopped and searched on the streets" in the 1970s, admitted <http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/01/07/stirevnws02006.html> that "political pragmatism" has now altered many of his earlier beliefs. "If people choose to characterise one as a turncoat," he said, "so be it."
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