An Arab arrow at Hamas' heart

[Colorado Blue]

Here is a story that was not written by a Jewish leftist bleeding heart, agitated by the death of a couple of Palestinians. It was penned by the important Palestinian columnist Hassan al-Batal in the Ramallah daily Al-Ayyam. At the end of the story there will be another annoying story, the kind that shows how one Arab can annoy other Arabs. Two lessons for the price of one.

"The Lebanese singer Fairuz has a regular song she sings for Christmas, 'I Am the Sad Mother,' is its name," wrote Al-Batal this week. "We have a sad Palestinian mother. Her name is Amana Abu al-Husseinim, a 38-year-old housewife married to a man who doesn't have a job. She has nine children, thank God. There is no way to describe her tragedy any better than to quote the records from Shifaa hospital in Gaza. I will quote briefly from a report by my colleague, reporter Riad Abu-Sitha: Five of Amana's children are in the hospital because of an explosion during the 'Jabalya carnival' . Ahmed, 14, and Mahmoud, 15, are in the main treatment room. One lost a leg below the knee and is suffering from blood clots in the brain. The other has had a difficult operation on his thigh. A third brother, Mustafa, 13, has shrapnel wounds in both legs. A fourth, Iyash, 7, is wounded in one of his legs. A fifth, Iz al-Din, 11, asked about his brothers immediately after he awoke from the anesthesia. Amana lost another son, Balel, in another explosion in the Shati camp."

"If this were a Jewish mother," Al-Batal explains to his Palestinian readers, "she and her husband would be supported by their children's allowance for large families, or from the 'blessing' payments, as this money is called by us and by the Israelis, especially the religious ones. But with us, perhaps they'll now give the father some lousy job until his five children get better."

And then Al-Batal pulls out a razor-sharp arrow and aims it right at the Hamas: "The day after the explosion, Mr. Nazar Riyan, a Hamas leader, already had 'irrefutable evidence' of Israel's guilt." The writer goes on to mention a doctor who claimed he had found a piece of shrapnel from an Israeli missile with Hebrew writing on it in the body of one of the casualties. "Everyone is now an expert on everything," Al-Batal says mockingly, and continues: "Amana's tragedy is a result of the practice of all the organizations to recruit children in order to increase the size of their parades, and of the practice of having armed parades."

Snip

complete story:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/630950.html