PALESTINIANS OPPOSE BOMBING OF AFGHANISTAN

Occupied Jerusalem: 8 October, 2001

While denouncing the 11 September terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the vast bulk of Palestinians seems squarely opposed to the Anglo-American aerial and missile bombings of Afghanistan, a Muslim country.

"It is a shame to see the world's richest and most powerful country gleefully bullying the world's poorest and decimated country," said Sheikh Hasan Yousef, an Islamist spokesman in Ramallah.

However, he added "but shame and morality have never been part of American foreign policy and behavior. The country that has so blithely killed a million innocent Iraqi children and helped kill and maim hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians will do anything imaginable or unimaginable. It is the arrogance of power and the absence of justice."

Even people associated with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat are strongly opposed to western attacks on Afghanistan, although their public reactions are somewhat circumscribed for obvious reasons.

"I may not approve of Taliban's behavior, but unleashing American military power against a poor country and a helpless people is wrong and shameful, it is a sign of insolence and bellicosity ," said one of the top leaders of Fatah in the Hebron area, who asked for anonymity.

PA Chairman Yasser Arafat earlier instructed all PA officials not to comment publicly on the western attacks on Afghanistan.

PA official Yasser Abed Rabbo said the PA was still studying "this matter," adding that Arafat would seek to reach a common stance on the subject with fellow Arab states.

But, apart from Arab officialdoms, it seems abundantly clear that hostility to the United States is at a very high level and is even on the rise.

"You want me to love America and sympathize with it, never ever," said Mahmoud Al Shami, a taxi-cab driver from the Hebron countryside.

"Any Arab or Muslim sympathizing with America must be either out of his mind or a CIA agent. How can we forget that it is America that enabled Israel to do to us what it has been doing. America is the ultimate author of the Zionist genocide against our people, and America is the evil empire that maintains, sustains and shields Arab dictatorships against the repressed masses."

Nonetheless, Palestinians, who have been ravaged by a merciless Israeli rampage of murder and terror that has killed 700 and injured more than 20,000 since 28 September of last year, can offer the Afghani people very little apart from prayer and emotional identification, and probably some street protests.

Meanwhile, Palestinians enthusiastically lauded the videotaped statement of Osama Bin Laden, screened last night on al Jazeera satellite television.

Bin Laden said the death and destruction caused by the 11 September bombing were only a small part of what American has inflicted on Muslims in the last eighty years.

He, speaking solemnly and swearing by "God the Most High and the Most Great," warned that "America will never even dream of security if we can have in reality in Palestine."

"I disagree with his tactics, but he said the truth," said Sharif Hasan, a Palestinian student at the Polytechnic Institute in Hebron.

Palestinian newspapers printed Bin Laden's remarks on their front pages, highlighting the linkage between his struggle against American and the Palestinian cause.

"The world must realize that Israeli terrorism against the Palestinian people is the root-cause of the vast bulk of political violence all over the world," said the editor of the PA-semi official paper, al Hayatul Jadida.

It is likely that virtually all Arabs and Muslims (and many non-Muslims as well) in readily agree accept this statement.