From his entry in a dating website, one gets the impression that this perpetual “peace studies” major (he is in his mid-30’s and still working on his BA), and Berkeley tree sitter, is a sweet kid:

http://profiles.friendster.com/mrmatthew. 

He reminds us of ourselves when we were young and naïve hippies.  A look at his most comprehensive writing on the Palestine/Israel dispute shows a lot of wishful thinking. Core to it is the notion that Palestinians are the new Gandhis:

http://www.matthewtaylor.net/nvcoexistpalisfinal.pdf 

In order to arrive at this conclusion he takes a few incidents of Palestinian non-violent resistance and blows them out of all proportion to the true facts on the ground.  Any objective analysis of the Palestinian movement would show violence to be normative, and nonviolence something of an aberration.  Even supporters of the Palestinians must concede that their first leader, the grand mufti, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, was an active Nazi collaborator.  He spent the war years in Berlin and actively consulted with SS on the best methods for killing Jews.  For that purpose, he visited death camps.  His successor, Yassir Arafat, refined modern terrorism into an art.  One need merely look at what Palestinians do to each other.  Hamas routinely rounds up its opponents for summary execution, and Fatah does much the same.  Torture is a commonplace.  Palestinian resistance has never been Gandhism, but one would never know this by reading Taylor.