For me, one of the most vivid and galling memories of Sept. 11, 2001 was news footage of reactions on “the street” in communities throughout the Middle East. In particular, I remember one obscenely fat, “middle-aged” (she was probably 28) fishwife clad in a burqa, literally dancing in the street, grinning giddily. I recall thinking, “This is not the way civilized people act.”
Since then, I’ve had my notion of civilized adjusted downward for me several times. The rotund women celebrating the brutal murder of 3,000 innocent people was behaving in a perfectly civilized manner within the confines of a culture in which a man, refused permission to take on a second wife, retaliates by killing his first wife, hanging her corpse from a ceiling fan, and then shooting his two young daughters to death.
When I saw this tweet this morning, I was initially appalled until I checked my cultural privilege:
Fatah students celebrate “kidnapping” of 3 Israelis at Bir Zeit University. https://t.co/k7tWMymi1s pic.twitter.com/IOPLvfOyKC
— Khaled Abu Toameh (@KhaledAbuToameh) June 14, 2014
The Blaze fleshes out the details behind the tweet:
Palestinian moms, dads, grandparents, college students and children headed out over the weekend with sweets in hand to celebrate the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers.
One of the missing teenagers reportedly holds U.S. citizenship.
Reporters who cover Palestinian affairs linked to photos on Palestinian Facebook pages and websites documenting the festivities, while Israel Defense Forces troops were engaged in a massive manhunt to find Naftali Frenkel, 16, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Eyal Yifrach, 19, who disappeared on Thursday night heading home for the weekend from their boarding schools.
At Bir Zeit University near Ramallah, students affiliated with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction of the PLO handed out sweets at the campus entrance to celebrate the kidnapping.
There is even a picture (from Paltimes.net) of another overfed disciple of “The Word” handing out treats.
I was also impressed by this tweet from someone named Sohrad Amari:
So will @FLOTUS hold up a #BringBackOurBoys poster for the three kidnapped Israeli teens?
— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) June 14, 2014
In truth, however, the problem is not this administration, at least not entirely. It is the belief, popular among liberals, that both sides in the so-called Middle East “peace process” are acting in good faith.
