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Lynch Mobs Run Wild On Bethlehem's Streets
Independent (UK) ^ | 3-15-2002 | Phil Reeves

Posted on 03/14/2002 6:17:37 PM PST by blam

Lynch mobs run wild on Bethlehem's streets

As US envoy Anthony Zinni starts his peace mission, West Bank Palestinians resort to execution of collaborators

By Phil Reeves in Bethlehem
15 March 2002

US demands Israeli military withdrawal Wars breed hate, inhumanity and lawlessness. And this degrading trinity was on full display in Israeli-occupied Bethlehem yesterday outside the ancient church marking the place of Christ's birth.

Manger Square has become a wild, blood-drenched place, the scene yesterday of a lynching. Two years ago, the Pope shuffled across its flagstones, blessing Catholic pilgrims who had come by the thousand from across the globe to glimpse him.

This is where the BBC broadcast the turning of the millennium live to the world which – labouring under the illusion that the Middle East was making peace with itself – watched contentedly as a flock of white doves crashed into the corporation's cameras, before reeling up into the midnight sky.

Dozens of armed Palestinian men – some wearing the fatigues of Yasser Arafat's assorted security services, others in the jeans and black jackets of the Tanzim militia – were strolling across the same flagstones yesterday.

Kalashnikovs slung across their chests, they lounged on benches once used by elderly American tourists recovering from queuing to see the now echoingly empty Church of the Nativity, one of Christianity's holiest shrines. They darted across the square's exposed south-eastern corner, fearful of being caught in the crosshairs of Israeli snipers on a nearby high-rise. They smoked and stroked their weapons.

For some, this is home now. Hundreds of young men have taken refuge here after the Israeli army stormed into the overcrowded refugee camps in which they lived, and rounded up many hundreds of males, taking off suspected activists for interrogation by its Shin Bet security agents. Knowing that their names would show up on Israel's computer records, leading to their certain arrest, they have preferred to seek sanctuary. At night they bed down on mattresses in a car park and under the empty frame of a quarter-built luxury hotel near Manger Square.

"The naive think that this is a place of shelter for them because of the Church of the Nativity," said Nafiz al-Rifai, a Bethlehem city councillor who helps organise food supplies for an estimated 600 displaced men. "But the political people among them know that Ariel Sharon [Israel's Prime Minister] knows no boundaries."

The latter point has become clear to the residents of Bethlehem's Holy Family Maternity Hospital, whacked yesterday by an Israeli tank shell. During a barrage of bullets and artillery, the shell punched a bowling ball-sized dent in the façade of its 200-year-old church.

But Manger Square was also witness to a barbarity of a different order. Early yesterday, two Palestinian men accused of collaborating with Israel were shot dead by a militia gang. They spat on the corpses and pummelled them with iron bars.

The bullet-riddled body of one of them, Mahmoud Sabatin, was tied to the back of a pick-up truck and dragged from neighbouring Beit Sahour to Bethlehem. He was hauled into the square, where his killers showed him off on the steps of the Bethlehem Peace Centre, just a few yards from the Church of the Nativity. Then they dragged him away again, by a rope tied to his ankle. His lifeless frame bumped across the flagstones.

The immediate family of the second lynched man, a 29-year-old mechanic called Mohammed Deifallah, live nearby and have been fired from their jobs and ostracised by neighbours. They could not get permission yesterday to bury their murdered relative on Palestinian land, and were hoping to persuade the Israelis to allow them to bury him in a Muslim cemetery in nearby Israel.

"This is brutal terrorism. Even animals don't do this," his wife told The Independent.

The arrival yesterday of the US envoy, Anthony Zinni, charged with forging a ceasefire, was heralded by more bloodshed. Guerrillas killed three soldiers by blowing up an Israeli Merkava tank in the Gaza Strip – their second successful strike on an allegedly invulnerable war machine.

Israel further stoked the fires of war by assassinating Mutasen Hammad, a leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades near the West Bank town of Tulkarm.


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; Israel
KEYWORDS: bethlehem; christianlist; christianpersecutio; islamicviolence; israel; lynchmobs; zionist
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1 posted on 03/14/2002 6:17:37 PM PST by blam
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To: blam
The bullet-riddled body of one of them, Mahmoud Sabatin, was tied to the back of a pick-up truck and dragged from neighbouring Beit Sahour to Bethlehem. He was hauled into the square, where his killers showed him off on the steps of the Bethlehem Peace Centre, just a few yards from the Church of the Nativity. Then they dragged him away again, by a rope tied to his ankle. His lifeless frame bumped across the flagstones.

Lovely, isn't it? I don't think people like this should be classified as human.

2 posted on 03/14/2002 6:25:23 PM PST by McGavin999
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To: blam
They just like killing people. This is the unfettered human ego, on display for all to observe.
3 posted on 03/14/2002 6:31:11 PM PST by Dialup Llama
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Palestinians are the ogres of this opera we call life. What the hell? Mothers sending their sons to their own and Israeli deaths? Suicide missions sanctioned by Arafathead? Where's the end? It's like welfare bottom feeders here, who wish to always be attached to the teat of society...no compromise, no reasoning. Enough to sicken the most desensitized amongst us.
4 posted on 03/14/2002 6:32:22 PM PST by cincinnati_Steve
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To: blam
Islam - a religion of peace and love. (They just LOVE killing people!)
5 posted on 03/14/2002 6:34:04 PM PST by neutrino
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To: *Islamic_Violence
Piece of Religion bump.
6 posted on 03/14/2002 6:35:47 PM PST by denydenydeny
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To: blam
It's stories like this that make me ask "Why even have a Palestine?"
7 posted on 03/14/2002 6:40:49 PM PST by Salvation
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To: blam; All

The Second Coming -- W. B. Yeats


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

8 posted on 03/14/2002 6:43:31 PM PST by Darth Sidious
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To: Darth Sidious
What Yeats is saying is, we cannot have the little fat materialist world we want so badly, in the modern west.

We have only a choice between the Second Coming of Christ=Coming of Messiah, as religious Jews and Christians are awaiting...

Or a descent into millennia of medieval darkness and bloodshed, desolations, maybe 1 in a hundred humans surviving. Starvations and mayhems.

Either world is fanatically religious, to our tastes. But does that mean there is nothing at all to choose between them, like our Liberals insist?

9 posted on 03/14/2002 6:49:03 PM PST by crystalk
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To: *Zion_ist
Check the Bump List folders for articles related to and descriptions of the above topic(s) or for other topics of interest.
10 posted on 03/14/2002 6:58:54 PM PST by Free the USA
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Comment #11 Removed by Moderator

To: McGavin999
The entire article is blaming Israel for the barbarity of the Muslims. Anothercase of moral inversion.
12 posted on 03/14/2002 7:19:03 PM PST by rebdov
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To: McGavin999
"Lovely, isn't it? I don't think people like this should be classified as human"

"the truth shall set you free...."
if you don't kill them, they will kill you...
maybe you too, can be the "star of your own parade"
being dragged thru the streets...

if you don't kill them, they will kill you...

13 posted on 03/14/2002 8:53:31 PM PST by hoot2
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To: blam
A collaborator is anyone who doesn't want all the Jews dead.
14 posted on 03/14/2002 9:39:13 PM PST by weikel
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To: crystalk
Jesus loves Capitalism, he just doesn't want people to work too hard, do evil, or to worry to much and miss the greatness of living and sharing. He asks us to love and help each other, what's wrong with that? Any way you read it, ultimately Jesus is Goodness which beats the evil gushing from Islam.
15 posted on 03/14/2002 10:50:03 PM PST by Darheel
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To: neutrino
Islam - a religion of peace and love. (They just LOVE killing people!)

Sad to say .. but I think you're right

16 posted on 03/14/2002 11:01:50 PM PST by Mo1
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To: McGavin999
Lovely, isn't it? I don't think people like this should be classified as human

According to some sources, the Arab Peoples are related to the "Giants" that populated the earth before the flood.

This would make them genetically different from garden variety humans.

You don't have to dig too far to find detailed references of the sons of Noah,their wives and their affiliation with the pre-diluvian gene pool

17 posted on 03/14/2002 11:18:07 PM PST by Podkayne
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To: Salvation
According to JTF.org Palestine = Philistine. The Jews have been whomping on these people for quite a while.

And they have were directed to pursue "ethnic cleansing" by an external intervention in the time of the Kings.

18 posted on 03/14/2002 11:21:29 PM PST by Podkayne
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To: blam
Israel further stoked the fires of war by assassinating Mutasen Hammad, a leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, the Arafat-run organization carrying out a large portion of the terrorism of the last few months. How Israel "stoked the fires" by eliminating a terrorist ringleader, we'll never know.
19 posted on 03/14/2002 11:24:18 PM PST by xm177e2
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To: Podkayne
The JTF represents very, very, very few people.
20 posted on 03/14/2002 11:32:40 PM PST by xm177e2
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