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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: thames_sider who wrote (26448)	9/11/2001 12:19:18 PM
From: E	Respond to of 82486

Here's another excerpt from the article: "What was missing was anger. even in the trenches, even while throwing stones, none of the boys seemed particularly enraged. If anything, they appeared to be having fun. Yehya and Rami, two of the kids who had known Ahmed, spent half an hour assembling an enormous slingshot that required both of them to operate. They called it a Palestinian tank. Nobody cared that its accuracy could at best be considered random. Anyone who found a soda bottle would rush off and soon return with it half-filled with gasoline, a rag stuffed in the neck. The rag would be lit and the bottle tossed, to trenchwide cheers. It usually landed nowhere near an Israeli soldier. The Gaza soil never seemed short of rocks, though once in a while a donkey cart laden with cinder blocks would arrive and the boys would race to the cart, smash the blocks and return to the front with armloads of fresh ammunition. During the frequent cigarette breaks, the preferred brand was Marlboro, because if you took a pack and turned it upside down, the word ''Marlboro,'' when inverted, approximated the Arabic script for the phrase ''Horrible Jew.'' "

To: thames_sider who wrote (26448)	9/11/2001 12:20:42 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

One more: "Not one Palestinian political faction, no matter how militant, claims that it encourages children to participate in the clashes. Every party's official position is that it's better for the children to stay home. But if the boys decide on their own to fight, the organizations all say, well, there's nothing we can do to stop them -- this is a popular uprising, after all, and the children, like the rest of us, feel strongly about recapturing our homeland. At the front, the boys themselves could not say precisely who or what had motivated them to fight. They were too young to be affiliated with a political party, though most knew their parents' party, which was overwhelmingly Hamas, the fundamentalist movement that denies Israel's right to exist. Nobody told them to come, the boys all affirmed. They saw images on television, they said, or joined a demonstration, or knew a friend who fought. There were no recruitment drives or strategy sessions or battle plans. They were just here to throw rocks. It was better than going to school."