Three more Qassam rockets are fired this morning into Israel's western Negev region. All of them land in open areas and cause no injuries or damage. Yesterday afternoon, a Qassam landed near Sderot, and crashed into some agricultural hothouses, causing property damage.
An indication of the cloud-cuckoo-land approach of some to these daily acts of lethal violence can be gotten from a report we saw yesterday on the JPost.com website.
Under the heading 'Kassams aren't meant to kill', this is an interview with the mayor of one of the Gaza towns most involved in firing explosives into Israeli civilian areas. His response is a classic reality-reversal: the Gazans are the victims, and it's their children who suffer when "the resistance" fire those Qassams into Israeli schools and homes.
Here's the story:
Mohammad Kafarna is a sheikh, a Ph.D. professor of the Arabic language, and a member of Hamas's political wing. Since February 2005 he is also the mayor of Beit Hanun, a job that has become practically mission impossible. Violence and poverty plague his city of some 30,000. Unemployment is at 70%, physical abuse within families is increasing, and political factions and extended families are fighting and killing each other. Making things worse, the town, which faces Sderot across the 1967 border, has been shelled continuously by Israel for the last few months in response to Palestinian rockets being fired from its neighborhoods at Sderot, causing fear, destruction and sometimes death. Eli Moyal, the mayor of Sderot, has said Beit Hanun should be wiped out if necessary to stop the Kassam fire. "You think this will solve the problem?" Kafarna responded. "And is it just?" While Israel blames the Palestinians for initiating and maintaining the cross-border fire, the 40-year-old mayor, in an interview with The Jerusalem Post in his municipality office Wednesday, echoed other Palestinians in blaming Israel. "The mayor of Sderot is upset about the rockets?" he asked rhetorically. "And we are not upset that he wants to destroy our town? Which is easier, stopping the shooting on Beit Hanun or demolishing the city? You think the weak is the one hurting the strong. We are the hand trying to stop the sword." The consequences of the fire, said the mayor, were not only harmful to those directly and physically affected. "Our children are not children. They don't enjoy their childhood. They play with toy guns. The culture of violence exists in them." Increased domestic violence was also a direct consequence of the shelling, he said. While Kafarna said he favored "quiet and stability," he also defended the Palestinians' right to attack Israel. "It is the right of the people who were hurt to fight for their rights," he said. "Doesn't the Israeli citizen kill others to get his rights and to preserve his security? So why does he deny this to others?" Still, Kafarna said that if Israel would stop shooting on Beit Hanun, he might be able to convince the "resistance" to stop shooting at Sderot. "We hope that the mayor of Sderot will pressure his government to stop the shelling on Beit Hanun, to give me the opportunity to talk to the resistance to stop shooting on Sderot," he said, adding, "But how do you want me to talk to the resistance when there is bombing from Sderot on Beit Hanun? It's not patriotic." [and so it continues]A more sober and realistic view of things can be gotten from this statistic. The number of explosive missiles fired by Arab terrorists - like the Hamas colleagues of Dr Kafarna and others - into Israel from Gaza since the Israeli presence in Gaza ended last summer (the so-called "disengagement") now stands at more than 500.
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