YASSIN EMBRACED AS MARTYR BY ARAFAT, MUCH LIKE JOGGER KHOURI
By Michael Widlanski 22 March 2004

Yasser Arafat's Palestinian National Authority publicly embraced the
slain Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, leader of the HAMAS movement, as a "brother
warrior," following his fiery death by helicopter-borne Israeli missiles.

Sheikh Yassin, who was crippled in a soccer game in his youth, had been
the active spiritual leader of the HAMAS (an abbreviation in Arabic for
Harakat al-Muqawwima al-Islamiyya: The Islamic Resistance Movement) which
calls for Israel's destruction and has taken responsibility for more than
several hundred murders of Israelis.

"Today is a bloody day in Gaza" declared Palestinian State television
from Gaza only minutes after two Israeli missiles caught Sheikh Yassin in
his wheel chair as he emerged from the dawn prayers, known as al-Fajr, from
a mosque in Gaza.

"This is a day that has bought the red blood and the pure body of the
Sheikh, the crippled sheikh, who had led the Islamic resistance movement,"
proclaimed Arafat's state television which called Yassin a "shaheed"-Arabic
for "martyr" or "witness to Allah's greatness."

It was the second day in a row that Arafat's PNA and his FATAH movement
publicly identified themselves with a policy of terror attacks against
Israel. In yesterday's programming, the Palestinian state broadcasting media
opened with an elaborate public apology from Arafat and his colleagues to
the parents of George Elias Khouri who had been shot down by FATAH gunmen in
a Jerusalem neighborhood on Friday night while he was jogging.

Arafat and his colleagues, speaking through Voice of Palestine Radio
yesterday, made it clear that their actions were an innocent but tragic
mistake not because they had murdered an unarmed man in Jerusalem but
because the man turned out to be an Arab and not a Jew.

The murder of Khouri, a student at Hebrew University, was doubly
embarrassing to Arafat because the 20-year-old student was the son of Elias
Khouri, a wealthy lawyer who has defended PNA and FATAH members in Israeli
courts.

The Voice of Palestine radio and PA tv emphasized that the FATAH
declared George Khouri "a shaheed"-a martyr, but lawyer Elias Khouri, a
Christian rejected the Islamic-tinged complement even as other PA officials
sheepishly acknowledged their discomfort.

"Mistakes happen," admitted Ziad Abu-Zayad, one of the PNA's top
officials in the Jerusalem area.

Arafat's FATAH movement originally bragged about the killing of the
"settler" in the "settlement" of French Hill at the foot of Mount Scopus,
the original campus of the Hebrew University which had been Jewish-owned
territory even before 1948.

Rather than dissociate itself from terror actions or condemning or
hemming in the HAMAS or the FATAH "Martyrs' Brigades," Arafat's state media
have returned their programming to incessant incitement, playing martial
music, songs of martyrdom and showing film montages of bloody clashes
between Palestinians and Israel.

"This is another example of the state terror and the assassinations of
Israel," declared PA television from Gaza shortly after seven am Monday.

The Palestinian media gave great stress to the Israeli reports that
Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who is facing severe political and
legal problems, personally directed "the cowardly assassination operation."

The tone of the broadcasts suggested that a personal revenge attempt
against the Israeli leader was actually being encouraged.

"These are the actions of a crazy state that does not care about
inflaming the entire region," declared PA television.

* Dr. Michael Widlanski teaches at the Hebrew University's Rothberg School.
He recently completed a seven-year research project on the Palestinian
broadcast media.