There are three million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and West Bank including Jerusalem, one million Palestinians living inside the borders of Israel, and another four million Palestinian refugees living elsewhere in the world, including the United States. The footage in question depicted between 20 and 40 individuals. The Palestinians in the footage were mostly young children. Most of their behaviour in the footage appeared to be no different from how Palestinian children always behave when foreign journalists turn up in their towns, crowding and smiling at the camera and giving the victory sign that has been a symbol of Palestinian steadfastness under Israeli military occupation since the first Intifada in 1987. There is not a single reporter with any experience of carrying a camera into the Palestinian West Bank under any circumstance who couldn't get similar footage on any day they visited the occupied territories. Where genuine rejoicing at the attacks was indeed apparent in the footage, anchors interpreting the footage made no effort to offer any context or background to the images, nor any attempt to separate those Palestinians portrayed from Palestinians as a whole. A comparable situation would be television anchors angrily reacting to scenes of the 1991 riots in Los Angeles, lamenting that "blacks do not respect law and order", while failing to note the preceding attack on Rodney King or endemic racial profiling of the black community in the U.S. by police forces. The overwhelming number of Palestinians, like people of all nationalities, were sickened by the events in New York and Washington. Palestinians with relatives in New York and Washington spent much of yesterday worriedly trying to phone to check they were safe, exactly as many Americans did. Palestinian citizens of the United States will also turn out to be among the victims of the tragedy. Whatever a group of 20-40 Palestinian children happened to be doing yesterday morning in Nablus, East Jerusalem, or Ein Al-Hilweh Refugee Camp in Lebanon is no more representative of all Palestinians than the Klu Klux Klan rally -- which happened recently just down the road from where I live, in St. Paul, Minnesota -- is representative of all Americans. In addition, there is an all-important context of brutalisation -- that anchors completely failed to note -- which explains why even a single person would find any cause to celebrate yesterday's terrible carnage: For the last year now, Palestinian civilians have been living through a nightmare in which Israeli occupation forces have been nightly shelling their towns using tanks, helicopters, and other heavy weapons. Palestinians do not need a subscription to Jane's Defence Weekly to learn the origin of many of these weapons when they can pick up shell casings from the floors of their homes and from their backyards with MADE IN THE U.S.A. stamped on them. Weaponry used against Palestinians during the Intifada, much of which has been supplied to Israel by the United States or covered at some level by U.S. aid includes: Heavy weapons: F-16 fighter planes, Apache and Cobra attack helicopters, and Reshef patrol boats to attack Palestinian buildings and vehicles; and Armoured pile drivers and armoured bulldozers to destroy Palestinian homes and agricultural land. Heavy ammunition: Naval and tank artillery including 76mm, 105mm and 120mm high explosive rounds; M114 TOW rockets and Hell-Fire air-to-ground missiles; Shoulder-fired, anti-armour Light Anti-tank Weapons (LAW) rocket launchers firing 84mm or 90mm rockets; M203 and MK19 grenade launchers; 40-90 mm mortars; and A modified version of the M494 105mm, an anti-personnel cluster bomb. Smaller ammunition: 5.56 mm bullets for M-16 machine guns; 7.62 mm high velocity bullets for general purpose machine guns and Galil sniper rifles; 12.7 mm bullets for Browning machine guns and Barret sniper rifles; and The "less lethal" rubber-coated and plastic-coated metal bullets.
I'm curious and don't know much about it, but what do Palestinians have to do with 9/11? That attack was planned and carried out by Saudi nationalists who clearly said they wanted US soldiers off the holy soil of Saudi Arabia. Are these two groups associated by the overlap between Palestinians and Arabs?
The motive for the terrorist 9/11 attack seems to be a broader one: <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/44wK72Snm6Y&hl=pl_PL&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/44wK72Snm6Y&hl=pl_PL&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object> <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/J1bm2GPoFfg&hl=pl_PL&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/J1bm2GPoFfg&hl=pl_PL&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
I'd like Sameeh to answer that question! Why so silent, Sameeh? <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/I4D6hJA846M&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/I4D6hJA846M&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
Even in Bethlehem, Palestinian Christians are suffering under Muslim intolerance. By DANIEL SCHWAMMENTHAL Bethlehem Meet Yussuf Khoury, a 23-year old Palestinian refugee living in the West Bank. Unlike those descendents of refugees born in United Nations camps, Mr. Khoury fled his birthplace just two years ago. And he wasn't running away from Israelis, but from his Palestinian brethren in Gaza. Mr. Khoury's crime in that Hamas-ruled territory was to be a Christian, a transgression he compounded in the Islamists' eyes by writing love poems. "Muslims tied to Hamas tried to take me twice," says Mr. Khoury, and he didn't want to find out what they'd do to him if they ever kidnapped him. He hasn't seen his family since Christmas 2007 and is afraid even to talk to them on the phone. Speaking to a group of foreign journalists in the Bethlehem Bible College where he is studying theology, Mr. Khoury describes a life of fear in Gaza. "My sister is under a lot of pressure to wear a headscarf. People are turning more and more to Islamic fundamentalism and the situation for Christians is very difficult," he says. In 2007, one year after the Hamas takeover, the owner of Gaza's only Christian bookstore was abducted and murdered. Christian shops and schools have been firebombed. Little wonder that most of Mr. Khoury's Christian friends have also left Gaza. On the rare occasion that Western media cover the plight of Christians in the Palestinian territories, it is often to denounce Israel and its security barrier. Yet until Palestinian terrorist groups turned Bethlehem into a safe haven for suicide bombers, Bethlehemites were free to enter Israel, just as many Israelis routinely visited Bethlehem. The other truth usually ignored by the Western press is that the barrier helped restore calm and security not just in Israel, but also in the West Bank including Bethlehem. The Church of the Nativity, which Palestinian gunmen stormed and defiled in 2002 to escape from Israeli security forces, is now filled again with tourists and pilgrims from around the world. But even here in Jesus' birthplace, which is under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Christians live on a knife's edge. Mr. Khoury tells me that Muslims often stand in front of the gate of the Bible College and read from the Quran to intimidate Christian students. Other Muslims like to roll out their prayer rugs right in Manger Square. Asked about why Muslims would pray so close to one of Christianity's holiest sites, Pastor Alex Awad, dean of students at the Bible College, diplomatically advises me to pose this question to the Muslims themselves. Mindful of his community's precarious situation, he is at pains to stress that whatever problems Christians may have with their Muslim neighbors, it's not the PA's fault. "Muslims and Christians live here in relative harmony," he tells reporters, only to add that Christians "feel the pressure of Islam . . . There is intimidation and fanaticism but these are little instances and there is no general persecution." Samir Qumsieh, the founder of what he says is the holy land's only Christian TV station, also stresses that there is no "Christian suffering" and that the Christians' problems are not orchestrated by the PA. Yet his stories of land theft, beatings and intimidation make one wonder why, if the PA doesn't approve of such injustices, it is doing so little to stop it? Christians have only recently begun to talk about how Muslim gangs simply come and take possession of Christian-owned land while the Palestinian security services, almost exclusively staffed by Muslims, stand by. Mr. Qumsieh's own home was firebombed three years ago. The perpetrators were never caught. "We have never suffered as we are suffering now," Mr. Qumsieh confesses, violating his own introductory warning to the assorted foreign correspondents in his office not to use the word "suffering." Always a minority religion among the predominantly Muslim Palestinians, Christians are, Mr. Qumsieh says, "melting away," even in Bethlehem. While they represented about 80% of the city's population 60 years ago, their numbers are now down to about 20%, a result not just of Muslims' higher birth rates but also widespread Christian emigration. "Our future as a Christian community here is gloomy," Mr. Qumsieh says. Palestinian plight not attributable to Israel barely seems to register in the West's collective conscience. As Christians around the world remember Jesus' birth, perhaps we can think of Mr. Khoury and those Christians still suffering in Gaza and Bethlehem.
It is not your fault that the STD ate your brain away but " christian nurses mass murdered thousands man, women and children in churches ???? " With statements like that you are declaring yourself the biggest douche who ever posted on the internet.
If it is anything, it is you who apperently sufferes from STD hence you bringing the subject up AND miss-reading what I typed. I wrote Nuns, not nurses you dyslectic fuck. On the other hand, go fuck your self after reading the following, idiot: Now let's look closer at the crimes in particular, which were committed by both Nuns. Nun Gertrude turned away thousands of ethnic Tutsis who were fleeing from the genocide. Instead of sheltering these poor people which could have saved their lives, Nun Gertrude called Hutu soldiers who then stoned, hacked, and burned to death over 5,000 men, women, and children. Nun Marie was found guilty of supplying Hutu soldiers with the petrol they needed to start a fire and burn 700 people to death, who were hiding in a garage on the grounds of the convent. http://www.thebibleistheotherside.org/newsitem4.htm Finally, just before I go, I was only telling Captain that I could've been as stupid as he was by blaming every member of the Christian faith for the crime that was committed by a small minority.