Monday, October 11, 2010
Elder of ZiyonA father from Jabalia refugee camp in north Gaza killed his son by setting fire to him because the boy refused to help the family pick olives, police said.This is a tragic story of a murder (Arabic coverage quotes the father as saying he just wanted to scare his son, not kill him.)
Security forces identified the father as AN, and said the 40-year-old threatened to torch his son Mohammed, 14, when he refused to help him harvest olives. The father then sent the boy's brother to get Benzene and gave him 2 shekels ($0.50) to buy a lighter.
Police said AN chased Mohammad into the bathroom, and poured fuel over him. The boy managed to escape and ran towards his grandmother's house next door, but his father caught him and set alight to him. Mohammad's grandmother told police that she opened the door to find her grandson's body burned.
But check out the first comment in the English version of the story in Ma'an:
1) Maureen / Australia 10/10/2010 22:35
Jabala refugee camp. Without Zionist occupation of Palestine, families would not be struggling, physically and mentally, to exist under a Zionist strangle hold.
This is the new version of anti-semitism among the Left. If an Arab kills an Arab, it must be the "Zionists'" fault. The sheer lack of ability to think clearly, the amount of hate that it takes to blame a case of a father murdering his own son on Israel, shows that extreme leftist anti-Zionism has nothing to do with Zionism - it is just a new manifestation of anti-semitism, using Israel as a proxy for Jews. (But calling out this fact exposes one to accusations of watering down the term "anti-semitism.")
Nowhere did I see any Arabs blame this murder on Israeli "occupation." Their hatred is endemic, to be sure, and when they speak to Western media they will indeed blame everything on Israel, but at least they know deep down that they have to take at least some measure of responsibility for their actions.
Some on the extreme Left, however, just cannot help but to look at every single event that occurs in the Middle East through the glasses of their intense hatred for Israel. To them, bereft of the ability to think logically, Israel represents the ultimate evil, and the ultimate source for all evil. Israel is, to these moonbats, Satan. Therefore, if anything bad happens anywhere, it must be traceable back somehow to Zionists, or, often, Jews who are assumed to be Zionists.
It is a sickness, no less than traditional anti-semitism. I once named this "misoziony" to distinguish it from old-style anti-semitism and to deflect the criticism that the latter term brings up.
To the credit of most of Ma'an's commenters, Maureen was roundly criticized for her statement. Yet there are plenty of websites out there - some prominent - that espouse Maureen's way of thinking.
UPDATE: I've seen plenty of pictures of dead "martyrs" in the PalArab media, but I still cannot wrap my head around this: they are publishing pictures of the dead boy.
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