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From the Digital Stater, web version of the Daily Kent Stater newspaper, by "guest columnist" Julio Cesar Pino, certified loon:



digital stater | stories: Singing out a prayer for a youth martyr



You are not a terrorist, Ayat. The real terrorists are those who some 100 years ago hijacked a beautiful religion and transformed it into a real estate venture. Glancing around the world, they saw in Palestine "a land without a people, for a people without a land," as their spokesmen and women chant ad nauseaum. The Zion of the concertina wire, F-16 bomber death planes and tank crews collecting skulls and shedding martyrs' blood. The birthplace of your ancestor, and mine, the Palestinian pacifist Joshua ben Josef, is now a battle zone -- with Christians, Muslims and peace-loving Jews trapped inside Bethlehem.



Your last cry, by gesture rather than the spoken word, was "Stop, thief! This is not your land and we are a people." I can assure you, Ayat, that the whole world stopped to listen. Even the numbskull who parades as president of the United States heard you, and, following the text written for him by his handlers, expressed astonishment at how a teenager could perpetrate such an act. Simply, it is pronounced "justice" and spelled C-O-U-R-A-G-E.
He's an "associate professor history" who doesn't seem to know much history, except of the revisionist kind. He does know the language of hate, and he certainly knows how to encourage insanity in people, just the sort that encourages people to "die" for a cause. Ah well, it's an insane world, after all.



Some people can write excellent responses, however, such as Eric Olsen:



It goes without saying that there is so much crap here that it would require a case of toilet paper to deal with it, but let us put aside the incongruous equating of the Palestinians with Native Americans (who really were here first, but who were no more a “people” than the warring tribes of Afghanistan; at least the Palestinians are an actual “people,” but they have no more right to any particular piece of land than the Israelis do; the history of the Middle East is one of migrating tribes and peoples, conquerors coming and going, redefining boundaries to suit their own needs - like I said, it’s a political question that can only be resolved politically) and get to the heart of the matter. This man Pino thinks like an adolescent because spiritually he actually IS ONE. His romantic, faux-poetic blather about suicide bombers going to heaven and smiling beatifically down and whatnot sounds sincere - unlike the cynical rote manipulations of Osama bin Laden for example - but adolescent, even childish, because they are the ejaculations of a spiritual baby: he just converted to Islam two years ago....
Amen!

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