So the newest Palestinian Arab hero is a "son of the camp."Mohammad Assaf declared himself a "son of the camp" on Tuesday as he returned to the Gaza
Strip, where thousands of jubilant fans awaited the arrival of the Arab Idol star.
Flag-waving crowds waited for several hours at the Rafah crossing on Egypt's border for 23-year-old Assaf, three days after he was crowned the winner of the popular regional singing contest.
Assaf bent over and kissed the ground as he crossed the border, an AFP correspondent reported, before holding a news conference alongside Hamas officials.
"I thank you for your wonderful welcome and hope the celebrations won't feature gunfire," Assaf said, alluding to the shots in the air that sometimes accompany celebrations in the Middle East.
Assaf said he was the son of Palestine and "son of the (refugee) camp," and told reporters he would continue to sing nationalistic songs and raise the Palestinian flag.
Will any reporter ask why these camps still exist in territory that is ruled by Palestinian Arabs?
Why can't Hamas or the PA dismantle the camps and mainstream the residents into more normal society? There is nothing stopping that from happening. They are not "refugees" by any definition because even the ones who are over 65 years old are living in the land they came from. (At worst, they are "internally displaced persons.")
So why do these camps, often hotbeds of terror, exist?
Netty Gross, in The Jerusalem Report in July 1998, asked an official why the camps there hadn’t been dismantled. She was told the Palestinian Authority had made a “political decision” not to do anything for the more than 650,000 Palestinians living in the camps until the final-status talks with Israel took place. (quoted here.)
Keeping the people crammed into these "camps" is a violation of their human rights, but no human rights organizations are calling for Hamas or the PA to dismantle them and end the discrimination that exists even within Palestinian Arab ruled territory.
Indeed, the UN has condemned Israel for attempting to do just that!
Where are the human rights activists demanding that the camps be demolished and the people given normal housing and services in line with everyone else, to live in their land as normal citizens? Why did Assaf have to grow up in such miserable conditions?
The sad fact is that the camps exist for one reason only - to purposefully keep hundreds of thousands of people in misery to make Israel look bad, even though Israel does nothing to keep a single person in a "refugee" camp.
Don't believe me? Then look at this quote from Palestine's ambassador to Lebanon, Abdullah Abdullah, in 2011, quoted in Lebanon's Daily Star:
The ambassador unequivocally says that Palestinian refugees would not become citizens of the sought for U.N.-recognized Palestinian state, an issue that has been much discussed. “They are Palestinians, that’s their identity,” he says. “But … they are not automatically citizens.”Mohammad Assaf is part of the long tradition of anti-Israel propaganda where ordinary Palestinian Arabs are used as pawns and discriminated against even in places ruled by their leaders until Israel is destroyed. And that is the long-term plan - a plan that is apparently endorsed by the UN as well as by so-called "human rights" organizations who never say a word against the existence of these outdoor prisons for thousands of people.
This would not only apply to refugees in countries such as Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan or the other 132 countries where Abdullah says Palestinians reside. Abdullah said that “even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”