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<i>It shows that the Palestinian leaders have cultivated the radical elements of their society for a very long time. It ensures a ready stream of suicide terrorists.
It produces a public actually happy with the terrible conditions that result from complete economic collapse and disorder. (Their fervor instructs them that things are actually going well, y'see...)
In this case I feel we shouldn't. Whatever your political leaning, drop it; this is a cultural/religious thing. Their reaction to death is to truly celebrate it in detail as a victory for their side... no matter who dies. They love the death. That's wrong. No moral equivalence this time.
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No, you simply don't understand. It's totally idiotic to suggest that any group of people would be happy with such terrible conditions-- humans are humans. It might make you feel superior to them, which helps justifiy the violence against them, but religion is not a particularly significant factor; many Palestinians are Christian or secular, after all.
Essentially here you have a population of poor indigenous people who have been driven from their land and inhumanely oppressed by a bunch of Europeans. That they have survived such a brutal occupation is an achievement in itself. They are not celebrating death-- it's the Israelis who tore this body to shreds, remember. They are simply honouring their war dead. Yeah, it may seem gruesome to you, but then again, you aren't surrounded by dead countrymen on a daily basis.
As for the suicide bombers-- yeah, they are horrific and terrible. But it's not hard to see how they develop. They don't come from the Palestinian leadership, which is non-religious and which the bombers don't actually respect (would you blow yourself up for bush?) They are the by-product of israeli aggression-- if another people invaded, stole your land, poured racist scorn over you, killed your family members, collectively tortured your people, you might end up hating enough to blow yourself up to. All humans have their breaking points.
<i>While our natural western tendency is to find some kind of moral equivalence here, in fact doing that kind of thing often produces a complete misunderstanding of the real situation, and an instinct to explain away behavior like this.</i>
Your smugness is unjustified. It has nothing to do with being eastern or western; it has everything to do with the torture endured by the palestinian people, paid for with our tax dollars.
<i>I guess you could say that the Christian God says 'Thou shalt not kill' and Allah says 'Thou shalt kill infidels and yourself'
(BTW: this is just an educated guess from snipets of info. Please tell me if I'm wrong... )</i>
This is not an educated guess, anymore than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was written by Barbara Streisand. This is plain old bigotry.
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