Israeli blog Sha! has a few comments on Arafat's funeral:
November 12, 2004
Ra'is Bye Bye
There are certainly worse ways to while away a Friday afternoon than watching a hated enemy being buried.
With the eyes of the world on them, the Palestinians certainly put on an impressive funeral: well-organized, dignified, stately as befitting a beloved former leader.
No, wait, that was the Queen Mother's funeral.
Arafat's on the other hand was a display of Palestinian culture at its finest: tens of thousands of people streamed into the Muqata'ah pell mell. It took a while for the helicopter carrying Arafat's body before it was able to land, and then an even longer time before the crowd backed off enough so that the casket could be unloaded.
Then, the mourners swarmed around, all trying to lay their hands on the ra'is' corpse.
The 87 different Palestinian security services spent half their time trying to violently control the mob and the other half fighting with each other who would get to ride the coffin as it crowd surfed. And throughout, people shot their rifles in the air.
It was such a chaotic scene that when Yassie was finally lowered to the ground neither the attendant dignitaries nor the news media could get close to the burial plot. A fitting ending indeed.
I'm just curious what the final casualty count will be from the funeral. Besides the people who got trampled or roughed up by the security guys, I'm betting somebody got hit by gunfire.
(Here's a physics lesson: those bullets that the Palis shoot up in the air come back to earth at the exact same velocity that they went up. During the celebrations in Kuwait following the end of the first Gulf War, about a dozen people were killed by celebratory bullets coming down.)
Well, a final bye bye to Abu Amar. May your bones stay in Ramallah for eternity.
shaister.com |
