Posted on 05/11/2003 3:59:05 PM PDT by fightinJAG
Shrine to suicide bombers is a model of intolerance From A Correspondent in Balata refugee camp, West Bank
DARK corridors lined with photographs of the dead and imprisoned wind through Balata youth club in concentric circles, leading to a shrine to the Palestinian suicide bombers who have wrought devastation in Israel. As Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Prime Minister, met Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, to thrash out details of the “road map” to peace, in the West Bank’s largest refugee camp students from the Fatah movement that he founded with Yassir Arafat in the 1950s had other ideas.
The exhibition, which opened last week, has drawn hundreds of visitors from the shanty town on the outskirts of Nablus, where 20,000 Palestinian refugees live in poverty.
On entering, visitors step on an Israeli flag painted on the floor and are met with a model of the Elon Moreh Jewish settlement, which overlooks the refugee camp from a hilltop near by. Moving on from the polystyrene watchtowers and chicken-wire fence, they pass photographs of Palestinian prisoners, many posing with Kalashnikovs or striking kung-fu stances, before stepping into a display of the “martyrs”, those killed in the 2½-year conflict.
At the end of the winding galleries, visitors are invited to step into a black tent on a platform. Little girls run screaming out of the gloomy interior, where two dummies in masks sit with fake bombs and the final statements of revenge and violence stapled to their hands.
On the ground lies a stretcher with a model of a dead suicide bomber covered by a Palestinian flag, surrounded by wire and topped with a model of al-Asqa mosque in Jerusalem, Islam’s third-holiest shrine.
Mohammed Majud, 21, a student at Nablus’s An-Najaf university, said that the display had been created by 15 students from the Fatah movement with money donated by the faction and with the opening ceremony presided over by Fatah’s political leader in Nablus.
The widespread support for militant action is in stark contrast to the message of non-violence being preached by Mr Abbas, who has pledged to act against illegal arms, wind down the conflict and end all incitement to violence, in line with the peace initiative, which aims to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by the end of 2005.
Up the road in Nablus, students from the radical Islamic movement Hamas ran their own contribution to the conflict last week: a large model of paradise, complete with plastic trees, a fountain and goldfish, to give people a glimpse of what Hamas and other hardline groups say awaits those killed in the fight with Israel.
At the entrance of the large, air-conditioned exhibition where caged birds sang, were models of the graves of 26 students killed in the intifada, including six suicide bombers.
Martyrs that were killed? By who? A martyr is someone who killed himself, not someone killed by someone.
It talks about funds donated from the PA? Well, now I know where my 50Million tax money promised to Abbas by Powell will be going to, among other places.
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