Boo Freakin’ Hoo
Al-Reuters is throwing a gigantic pity party for the Palestinian Arabs, as today is the no-fun holiday called Naqba (Catastrophe)—the Arab term for the creation of Israel: Palestinian Refugees Twice Over Mark ‘Catastrophe’.
GAZA (Reuters) - For Mohammed al-Bassiouny, the war over Israel’s creation in 1948 spelled lifelong misery in a dead-end refugee camp. [A war they started, and a war they lost. —ed.] But as fellow Palestinians on Saturday marked the 56th anniversary of the time they call the Nakba or “catastrophe” Bassiouny felt doubly dispossessed, having just lost his three-storey breeze-block house in the Gaza Strip to an Israeli army raid.
“My home is gone, the home also of 40 of my relatives, half of them children. All this, the Israelis destroyed,” he told Reuters by telephone from Rafah camp.
Throughout Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians stood with heads bowed as sirens wailed from minarets at noon. They then marched in their thousands bearing banners with the names of Palestinian townships now either razed or renamed in Israel.
The annual show of mourning was especially resonant in Rafah, where at least 12 Palestinians died in weeklong fighting.
And no Arab day of mourning is complete without some flag-burning and hate speech: Palestinian refugees torch Israeli, US flags in memory of 1948.
AIN AL-HELWEH, Lebanon (AFP) - Thousands of Palestinian refugees rallied here to commemorate the loss of their homes with the creation of Israel in 1948, dubbed al-Naqba (the catastrophe) by Arabs.
More than 7,000 refugees took to the streets of the Ain al-Helweh refugee camp on the outskirts of the southern port of Sidon, protected by armed militiamen and chanting anti-Israeli slogans.
They torched Israeli and US flags in the main square at the camp’s northern entrance, alongside the headquarters of the mainstream Fatah movement of veteran Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
The demonstrators also burned effigies of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as well as US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair — both accused of blind support for the Jewish state.
“We will continue the struggle to confront the Israeli and American plot against the Palestinians. We call on the Arabs to help the Palestinians return home,” said Khaled Aref, the Fatah representative in Sidon.
A Palestinian masked “militant” from Islamic Jihad gestures as he stands in front of a burning representation of an Israeli army tower during a demonstration marking the 56th anniversary of Al Naqba, or “the catastrophe” in Gaza City, Saturday, May 15, 2004. Palestinians commemorate Al Naqba, May 15 each year, to mark their displacement by the founding of Israeli in 1948. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer)
Lovely people. I know … let’s reward them with their own state!