PUBLIC MARKS with tags palestine & hamas

Fighting between the ruling Hamas movement and its Fatah rivals escalated Sunday, with an attack launched on the foreign minister's convoy followed by shots fired at the Palestinian president's Gaza residence in apparent retaliation, witnesses said.

Why do I list the names of the dead before the usual talk about the geopolitical implications, the responses of shock and outrage from heads of state, the defiant statements by Hamas and Islamic Jihad? Because there are three things about the violence in Israel, or more to the point, media coverage of it, that have been bothering me of late, but especially since I've been reading more and more blogs from the people whose lives are most affected by it...

As the new Palestinian culture minister, he will not be ordering the dynamiting of statues nor forbidding prayers to anyone but Allah. But there are limits - and belly dancing is one of them. “Belly dancing is naked women. This is not Islamic. The Egyptians come here and do it. And there are a lot of Russian belly dancers in Egypt and they come here too. People do it indoors, in secret. There’s lots of it. If the phenomenon of belly dancing spreads our people might react against it by killing people. We don’t want our people to become like the Taliban.”

If Palestinians are going to be required to renounce violence — as they should be — shouldn’t Israel also be required to renounce violence, and to stop building settlements and walls on Palestinian territory? Rather than belittling others for allegedly failing to grasp our “democratic concepts,” we could begin by showing we grasp these concepts ourselves.