Posted on 09/23/2001 1:09:40 PM PDT by Sabramerican
Palestinians recreate Sbarro bombing
By Mohammed Daraghmeh, The Associated Press
NABLUS, West Bank - Opening an exhibition today marking a year of violence, a Palestinian re-enacted a bloody suicide bombing in Jerusalem.
Wearing a military uniform and a black mask, he entered a doorway under a replica of the Sbarro pizza restaurant in Jerusalem, and set off a fake explosion.
Visitors crowded through the doorway to see a recreation of the August 9th suicide bombing, complete with body parts and pizza slices strewn all over. In the downtown Jerusalem attack, the bomber and 15 other people were killed.
In another room of the exhibition, visitors looked through dark windows to see figures dressed as suicide bombers, each with one hand on Islam's holy Koran and the other on an automatic rifle, re-enacting the grisly last testament by real suicide bombers in front of video cameras before carrying out their deadly attacks.
"Our message from this exhibition to our people is that the occupiers will suffer as long as we are under occupation," said Ala Hmedan, one of the organizers of the exhibition.
"To the Israeli people: if you leave the occupied territories, you will not suffer and you will not see blood any more," he said.
Twenty-one Palestinians have blown themselves up in the past year, killing more than 50 people and wounding hundreds, unsettling and infuriating Israelis.
The Palestinians have said their uprising, or intifada, was a struggle for statehood and an end to Israel's 34-year occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.
A shrine in one room pays tribute to three leaders of the militant Hamas killed in targeted attacks by Israel. Three open graves surrounded by candles expose three white coffins for Jamal Mansour, Jamal Salim and Salah Darwazeh, all top Hamas men in Nablus.
Near the end of the exhibition stands a large rock. Behind it is a figure wearing a black hat, black jacket and black trousers, typifying an ultra-Orthodox Jew.
A recording from inside the rock calls out: "O believer, there is a Jewish man behind me, come and kill him."
Al Najah University, a hotbed for militants, has spawned several suicide bombers since the violence began. Many students belong to or support Hamas, which opposes peace deals with Israel and has claimed responsibility for many of the suicide bomb attacks.
Palestinian support for suicide bombings against Israel has increased sharply in recent months. A July poll showed 58 percent support for the bombers, more than double the figure of four years ago, when hopes for a peace deal were strong.
Looking at the exhibits, economics student Ghadir Haddad, 19, identified fully with the displays of violence.
"This exhibition shows the reality we live in. Suicide bombings here, killings there," she said. "I'm very happy because as they kill and torture us they are also killed and tortured."
All the Pallie lovers around here can now come and defend this savagery.
Arafat, on the morning of Sept. 11, praised suicide bombers as "holy warriors."
An eye for an eye is a formula for eternal war? The bombings/beatings will continue untill attitudes improve?
Stop?
But wait - the politicians keep telling me that 99% of Arabs/Muslims denounce violence and hatred?!
So what Ham-dan is saying is that the palies are a bunch of murdering terrorists and will continue such acts into the future.
"To the Israeli people: if you leave the occupied territories, you will not suffer and you will not see blood any more," he said.
No doubt as sincere a promise as all the previous cease fires have been. In other words, Ham-dan is lying through his teeth.
But more interesting than all that is a central issue - the palies with this exhibit are stating that they are terrorists who have committed suicide bombings in the past, and have every intention of doing so in the future.
Which begs a simple question: When does the war on terrorism expand to the removal of arapigfat and his band of cockroaches?
And I'm confident you have as much faith and trust in the pronouncements of the typical politician as do I!
and just be horrified
Or will Arab pizza sales increase. Pizza is so much more delicious when you can associate it with body parts.
Blowing it up when it is occupied, although offering more than a small measure of justice, is not the way to go.
However, it should be flattened, so that nothing but smoking rubble remains.
The (More er Less) Honorable Billybob,
cyberCongressman from Western Carolina
By Daniel Pipes
September 13, 2000 - Today is the day when a Palestinian state was nearly declared - for the third time.
On October 1, 1948, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Husseini, stood before the Palestine National Council in Gaza and declared the existence of an All-Palestine Government.
In theory, this state already ruled Gaza and would soon control all of Palestine. Accordingly, it was born with a full complement of ministers to lofty proclamations of Palestine's free, democratic, and sovereign nature. But the whole thing was a sham. Gaza was run by the Egyptian government, the ministers had nothing to oversee, and the All-Palestine Government never expanded anywhere. Instead, this facade quickly withered away.
Almost exactly forty years later, on November 15, 1988, a Palestinian state was again proclaimed, again at a meeting of the Palestine National Council.
This time, Yasser Arafat called it into being. In some ways, this state was even more futile than the first, being proclaimed in Algiers, almost 3,000 kilometers and four borders away from Palestine, and controlling not a centimeter of the territory it claimed. Although the Algiers declaration received enormous attention at the time (the Washington Post's front-page story read "PLO Proclaims Palestinian State"), a dozen years later it is nearly as forgotten as the Gazan declaration that preceded it.
In other words, today's declaration of a Palestinian state would have retreaded some well-worn ground.
We do not know what today's statement would have said, but like the 1988 document it probably would have claimed that "the Palestinian Arab people forged its national identity" in distant antiquity.
In fact, the Palestinian identity goes back, not to antiquity, but precisely to 1920. No "Palestinian Arab people" existed at the start of 1920 but by December it took shape in a form recognizably similar to today's.
Until the late nineteenth century, residents living in the region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean identified themselves primarily in terms of religion: Moslems felt far stronger bonds with remote co-religionists than with nearby Christians and Jews. Living in that area did not imply any sense of common political purpose.
Then came the ideology of nationalism from Europe; its ideal of a government that embodies the spirit of its people was alien but appealing to Middle Easterners. How to apply this ideal, though? Who constitutes a nation and where must the boundaries be? These questions stimulated huge debates.
Some said the residents of the Levant are a nation; others said Eastern Arabic speakers; or all Arabic speakers; or all Moslems.
But no one suggested "Palestinians," and for good reason. Palestine, then a secular way of saying Eretz Yisra'el or Terra Sancta, embodied a purely Jewish and Christian concept, one utterly foreign to Moslems, even repugnant to them.
This distaste was confirmed in April 1920, when the British occupying force carved out a "Palestine." Moslems reacted very suspiciously, rightly seeing this designation as a victory for Zionism. Less accurately, they worried about it signaling a revival in the Crusader impulse. No prominent Moslem voices endorsed the delineation of Palestine in 1920; all protested it.
Instead, Moslems west of the Jordan directed their allegiance to Damascus, where the great-great-uncle of Jordan's King Abdullah II was then ruling; they identified themselves as Southern Syrians.
Interestingly, no one advocated this affiliation more emphatically than a young man named Amin Husseini. In July 1920, however, the French overthrew this Hashemite king, in the process killing the notion of a Southern Syria.
Isolated by the events of April and July, the Moslems of Palestine made the best of a bad situation. One prominent Jerusalemite commented, just days following the fall of the Hashemite kingdom: "after the recent events in Damascus, we have to effect a complete change in our plans here. Southern Syria no longer exists. We must defend Palestine."
Following this advice, the leadership in December 1920 adopted the goal of establishing an independent Palestinian state. Within a few years, this effort was led by Husseini.
Other identities - Syrian, Arab, and Moslem - continued to compete for decades afterward with the Palestinian one, but the latter has by now mostly swept the others aside and reigns nearly supreme.
That said, the fact that this identity is of such recent and expedient origins suggests that the Palestinian primacy is superficially rooted and that it could eventually come to an end, perhaps as quickly as it got started.
:
| Israeli President Moshe Katzav waves as he leaves the reopening of a bombed pizza restaurant in central Jerusalem, September 12, 2001. The pizza restaurant was the site where a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 15 Israelis on August 9, 2001. The restaurant re-opening was attended by the president as well as survivors and relatives of the bombing victims. REUTERS/Natalie Behring |
I have a few words. Wouldn't it have been poetic justice if the Israeli's had fired a helicopter missile at the re-creation in full swing, and when asked for a comment:
Well, they were celebrating a senseless attack that killed many civilians who were just having a good time. We thought we could improve the realism and give them a more recent event to celebrate.
Wait, wait! This is a trick!
Wait wait wait- It is the real Sbarros and it is a STORY made up by the Mossad!
No! Wait wait wait wait! The Palistinian people are shocked! Shocked I tell you. They really abhor violence.
No No No wait wait wait wait- This is only to sensitize the Israelis to Palistian suffering!
This is what you Israelis deserve! It serves you all right for oppressing everybody all the time everywhere!
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