9: Arafat on the ground
By Skip Schiel

Photos: Flag & man with rifle at a demonstration, Ramallah, November 2, 2004 (election day in the USA )

Several nights ago I attended a massive rally in the center of Ramallah, ostensibly in support of Arafat. All went joyfully and exuberantly—hoisting young men onto shoulders, chanting, marching, Until bang, bang, bang. Thought I: here come the firecrackers (common during Ramadan). The crowd flocked toward the sound.

As if in a twilight dream, I saw men, some of them masked, aiming their automatic rifles and pistols high. The men with guns had arrived. One fired off a pistol so near me I felt the air rushing by, driven by a bullet aimed to the skies, maybe at the nearly full moon.

I tried photographing all this, but sadly, my composure was not what is required for a dispassionate cool professionally journalistic rendering. I was afraid.

Suppose Yasser Arafat dies (at latest word he’s in a coma). Some say, no big problems for some time, civil society is fairly well in place. Others, watch out, could become tumultuous, look at Gaza and the internecine warfare occasionally breaking out.

I remain observant--or try--ready to change plans quickly.

I end with an account by Osama bin Laden about his motivations for planning the September 11 th attacks, sure you’ll see connections with current turmoil in Palestine and Israel .

“Bin Laden attempted to explain his reasons for the 9/11 attacks, stating that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 lit his homicidal fuse. ‘I will tell you the reasons behind these incidents,’ he said. ‘I will be honest with you on the moment when the decision was taken. We never thought of hitting the towers. But after we were so fed up, and we saw the oppression of the American-Israeli coalition on our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind and the incidents that really touched me directly goes back to 1982: When the US permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon with the assistance of the 6th fleet. In these hard moments, it occurred to me so many meanings I can’t explain, but it resulted in a general feeling of rejecting oppression, and gave me a hard determination to punish the oppressors. While I was looking at the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it came to my mind to punish the oppressor the same way and destroy towers in the U.S. to get a taste of what they tasted, and quit killing our children and women’”

--Osama bin Laden, quoted from a video tape broadcast on al Jazeera, supplementary words from “Osama's Election Editorial,” 30 Oct 2004, By, William Rivers Pitt, Republished from-- Truth Out