Saturday, October 18, 2014

18-Oct-14: If UK travel is in your plans... Part 2

Shortly after the August 2001 massacre that took the life of our daughter Malki, a student union at a university located just a few kilometers north of Jerusalem where we live created a chilling replica of the scene of the savagery. Its purpose was to celebrate the killings of the innocent victims, most of whom were children. And to honour the life and death of the human bomb who exploded inside the Jerusalem Sbarro pizza shop, killing 15 people immediately, leaving a 16th (a young mother, whose two year old daughter survived) unconscious from that day until today, and grievously maiming some 130 other visitors to the shop and passers-by.

Here's how Mohammed Daraghmeh of Associated Press described what he saw in a syndicated report ("Palestinians recreate Sbarro bombing") of a visit to the university campus in September 2001:
...Palestinian university students opened an exhibition Sunday that included a grisly re-enactment of a suicide bombing in Jerusalem. Wearing a military uniform and a black mask, a Palestinian set off a fake explosion in a replica of the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem, where a suicide bomber killed himself and 15 other people last month. It was one of the deadliest attacks in a year of Mideast violence and drew widespread international condemnation. The exhibit at Al-Najah University in Nablus was put on by students who support the militant Islamic movement Hamas, which carried out the Jerusalem attack. Support for Hamas traditionally runs high at the university, which is a hotbed for Palestinian militants and has produced a number of suicide bombers. Thousands of people, most of them university students, visited the exhibit, which is to run for a week in the university cafeteria. [News archive source]
On the campus of Al-Najah National University. Nablus:
a student-initiated replica of the scene of a massacre.
Unmistakable message: support for the killers
and joy over the (mainly children) dead victims
[Image Source: Getty]
The student/terrorist cell at Al-Najah abandoned any pretensions to subtlety or political correctness in mounting their cultural/political shrine. It included
not only gnawed pizza crusts but bloody plastic body parts suspended from the ceiling as if they were blasting through the air... Inside are toppled stools, pizza crusts, police tape, broken glass, as well as photographs of the actual scene of carnage and of the young Palestinian, Izzeden Masri, who carried into the restaurant some 20 pounds of explosive reportedly hidden in a guitar." ["An Exhibit On Campus Celebrates Grisly Deed", New York Times, September 26, 2001]
Photographs of the innocent children blown to pieces that day were not part of the show because this was an event that existed in order to celebrate murder and murderers.

No indications of a serious internal Palestinian Arab debate over whether to condemn the perversity and barbarism of the event and those who put it together and attended it has ever emerged. The sickening exhibit is as close to an authentic snapshot of the opinions of the people who make up the Al-Najah community as any one could expect to find. And if - which we very strongly doubt - we are wrong on this, here is an official and open request from us to you: if you know that any segment of Palestinian Arab society felt wretched and/or betrayed by the notorious Al-Najah replica of Israeli children being deliberately and consciously murdered in this Hamas attack on Sbarro Jerusalem, write and tell us.

Now this:

The student union at University of Manchester is going to hold a vote for a week starting October 24 on a proposal by its Socialist Workers Society to twin with Al-Najah National University and its Student Union for the next 3 years. This proposal, intended as a practical mark of solidarity with the Palestinian Arab institution, is being voted on at a time when Manchester's students have gotten plenty of information about the passion for terrorism embodied by Al-Najah and its students over many years. This hasn't stopped the initiative; as far as we can tell, it barely registers as a problem for the proposal's promoters.

Britain, 2014.

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