Family of Abd al-Rahman al-Shaludi |
Palestinians are angry because among other things their brethren are selling property to jews in Jerusalem and because jews are praying at the temple mount, which happens to be the holiest place in the jewish religion.
So twenty year old Palestinian Abd al-Rahman al-Shaludi waited for a train to stop yesterday and then plowed his car into a crowd of people at high speed, killing a three month old American child and injuring seven others.
I first learned of the incident from a BBC story. But what I found interesting was that they used the term terror attack in quotation marks. Which is sort of understandable because Britain has a large muslim population that it doesn't want to see offended and can you really believe anything the jews say anyway? This is pretty standard stuff for the BBC. The Israelis are always the victimizers in their narrative.
Notice that a human being didn't cause the attack, a car caused the attack. Maybe just an errant vehicle that got away. I was tooling around the net and found that someone else shared my curiosity at the headlines. Read this interesting article at honest reporting that fleshes the headline bias issue out pretty well.
The alleged perpetrator had been recently released from 14 months in prison. He was the nephew of senior Hamas bombmaker Mohyi Al Din Sharif, who was killed in 1998. Israelis said that al-shahudi was a Hamas member himself.
A Hamas spokesman praised the killing as “a daring operation” and a “natural response to the crimes of the occupation against our people and our holy places”.
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" The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is a Jewish tree." Hamas CharterA friend, who I like very much, told me yesterday that Israelis should be nicer to the Palestinians. Agreed. But I think that it is hard for people who have never visited or lived in Israel to understand what really happens there. Or understands that there is a huge Israeli Arab population that lives and works in relative harmony with the jewish population. And holds elected office.
I am not a Likudnik. I think that Netanyahu is a duplicitous bastard. But I also understand that every time there is a killing like this one, more and more Israelis slide to the right. It is awful hard to parley with a party whose charter calls for your extermination. Who are tunneling under your borders and firing rockets at you, no matter how inaccurate they may be. People get tired of that shit.
I have never met a single Israeli who did not desire peace. But practically every time the Israelis open up a border crossing to relieve pressure on the occupied there is an inevitable "incident" where the Israelis get shot at and killed. They get tired of being targets.
"It is easy for those of us who do not live under the tyranny of the occupation to condemn the military wing of Hamas for using randomly fired rockets that might cause civilian casualties in neighboring Israel, and I do unreservedly condemn it. Having said that, an occupied population has the legal right to resist the military of the occupier." Roger WatersIsrael is a fact of life, to the consternation of many, a thorn in the side of a native population that would like nothing more than see it cease to exist. As human beings, our first directive is self preservation, Israelis included. After all, it takes two honest players to forge an agreement. Can Abbas be trusted? Consider the words of his own close confidante, Ihab Al Ghussein:
"You know what Mahmoud Abbas says behind closed doors?? He says: 'Guys, let me [continue] saying what I say to the media. Those words are meant for the Americans and the occupation (i.e., Israel), not for you [Hamas]. What's important is what we agree on among ourselves. In other words, when I go out [publicly] and say that the [PA] government is my [Abbas'] government and it recognizes 'Israel' and so on, fine - these words are meant to trick the Americans. But we agree that the government has nothing to do with politics (i.e., foreign relations). The same thing happened in 2006, he [Abbas] said: 'Don't harp on everything I tell the media, forget about the statements in the media.'As I have often said, we desperately need a two state solution. With a legitimate contiguous state for the Palestinians, with adequate water, a place they can be proud of and a place that they can be free to institute whatever sharia they want on their side of the wall. But they can't have the whole falafel. They have to put the weapons down. The price has been paid for with too much blood already.
Come on [Abbas]!
The problem really isn't with him [Abbas], the problem is with whoever believes him. Ha, Ha, Ha! (I really do want real reconciliation, meaning partnership and achieving unity, but not reconciliation as Abbas means it)."
[Ihab Al-Ghussein's Facebook page, June 8, 2014]
2 comments:
I agree whole heartedly that the two state solution is what is needed. How do we get there???
You got me...
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