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"In Ramallah, a Hamas preacher, Hassan Yousef, announced the name of Marmash, 21, over mosque loudspeakers..."
MID-EAST REALITIES © - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 5/20: Mahmoud Ahmed Marmash -- 21 and now departed -- never knew anything other than Israel's brutal military occupation. He never knew anything other than Arab "client regimes" and the Arafat "Authority". He never knew anything other than a savage Israeli army, fueled by an increasingly racist ideology, armed and financed by America. And so, let us make no mistake about this, if he was a "terrorist" he was one made by Israel, the U.S., and in a complicitous way the repressive and co-opted Arab regimes all of which in combination twisted and tortured him into martyrdom. Remember the words of Professor Charles Black, words which were in fact also the motivation for Professor Black to write such a courageous pamphlet and then insist on having it published privately when for the first time none of the journals and publications he published in all his life would publish this essay. Speaking of the children of Palestine Professor Black wrote, just a few months after the first Intifada began:
"Against hugh odds...they decline to submit, and instead go out on the streets and pick up stones. They are beaten without letor mercy. They are imprisoned under obscene conditions, after kangaroo trials, or no trials at all. They are regularly shot at; enough of them are killed to make death as ever-present and as realistic a possibility as it was in our Korean and Vietnam Wars. Many are maimed; many are disfigured for life. Yet they come out in the streets again and again, these young people, some not much more than children, and they pick up stones.
"What name shall we give to the trait of character that produces conduct like this?
"Why do you hesitate? You know what the word is. Do youhesitate because that word just never happens to be spoken inAmerica in application to these young Palestinian people? Or is it because you fear that a revolution in your thought and feelingwill have to follow your pronouncing the word?
"Well, you're very likely right about that last. That makes younervous? So let me help you. I'll start things off by saying the word for you the first time. "The word is 'courage'."
Professor Charles L. Black, Jr. - 1988 Sterling Professor of Law Emeritus, Yale University [Full pamphlet at: http://www.JCOME.Org]
This was the world Mahmoud Ahmed Marmash was born into. He knew no other. Just a dozen years ago there were few if any suicide bombers in Palestine. But still another generation of occupation, repression, torture, deception, has created today's result. And tomorrow's result will be still more horrific if indeed the world community, especially the United States, continues to allow the Israelis to savagely brutalize the Palestinians.
There are some, maybe many, who will no doubt be surprised, maybe shocked, that we join in this acknowledgement of true martyrdom and stand up for those who have decided to struggle in the only ways still available to them against the overwhelming force of tanks, gunships, F-16s, and the covert might of the CIA. But these are times that require real seriousness and real "courage" from all of us, each in our own way.
For many Palestinians, the young man's bombing of a shopping centre on Israel's coastal plain makes him a hero. According to tradition, those who give their lives for an Islamic cause win a martyr's place in paradise.
The attack was claimed by the militant Hamas movement, which said the aim was to avenge the killing of five Palestinian policemen by Israeli troops earlier this week near Beitunia in the Ramallah area on the West Bank. There were also reports that it was in retaliation for the killing of the bodyguard of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the leader of Hamas.
In Ramallah, a Hamas preacher, Hassan Yousef, announced the name of Marmash, 21, over mosque loudspeakers yesterday, after noon prayers. Activists gave sweets to worshippers to celebrate the bombing.
Sheikh Yassin was reported as saying in Gaza: "Israel planted the violence by killing innocent people ... Now Israel is harvesting the reaction." Another Hamas spokesman, Ismail Abu Shanab, said: "This operation is a normal reaction from the Palestinian people responding to Israeli aggression".
The profile Marmash, the deadliest suicide bomber of this uprising, fits the description of Hamas recruits. A carpenter, he lived in a house with 13 relatives in Tulkarem, a town in the northern part of the West Bank.
"I am stunned," said one of his brothers, Samir. Marmash was devout and, according to his family, had not been in confrontations with Israel.
His mother did not know he was a Hamas member, and suspected nothing when he gave her a bag of sweets before setting off on his bombing mission.
Hamas has political and military wings. Its full-time membership is unknown, but it has many supporters and sympathisers.
It recruits in schools or mosques based on young people's dedication to Islam. Most suicide bombers are single men in their late teens or 20s. Hamas claims it has so many volunteers for suicide attacks that it turns many of them away: its warning yesterday that it has more bombers waiting in the wings has been taken seriously.
A series of suicide bombings against Israelis in past months has ignited fears that things are building up into a new campaign.
Few have forgotten the bus bombings by Hamas in February and March 1996 which killed nearly 60 Israelis, or the group's attacks in 1997 which killed 15 people in Jerusalem.
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| Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/5/213.htm |