How devoted to non-violence are the villagers of Nabi Saleh really?

People who go along to hear Bassem Tamimi in the United States ought to ask him and themselves whether his answer to the following question (we have been circulating it the past week) give them the kind of moral comfort that lets a person of conscience sleep at night. "Bassem Tamimi, tell us in simple words: are you as delighted by your cousin Ahlam Tamimi's massacre of Jewish children as she is? Have you criticized it ever, anywhere? Will you condemn it here and now?"

Mr and Mrs Bassem Tamimi's photogenic and very camera-aware 
daughter has been throwing fists into restrained but lethally 
equipped IDF service personnel faces since she was ten years old.
What kind of parent does that take?

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
11 September '15..

Nariman and Bassem Tamimi are the parents of the child now widely known in the social media as Shirley Temper.

It's a name she earned by emerging as a child prodigy in the thrusting of clenched fists into the faces of impassive, well-disciplined, heavily-armed and incredibly-self-restrained IDF soldiers since she was a very little girl, long before she had the capacity to make any decisions about who, what, why or when to seem to be really, physically angry.

The effect on large swathes of grown-up mainstream reporters, photo editors and commentators has been alarming.

Instead of doing the responsible and obvious (in any other setting, that is) thing - which obviously would mean condemning the parents for their shabby and irresponsible manipulation of a pretty, blonde, very-non-Arab-looking prepubescent girl - they have issued the parents with a free-pass while upgrading the child to a pint-sized, pouty-faced version of historical female warriors like Queen Boadicea, France's Marianne and the Maid of Orelans.

Given how often Palestinian rock-throwing attacks turn into firebomb showers and then shootings, stabbings and bombings, Nariman and Bassem Tamimi - both as parents and as full-time propagandists professing a somewhat confused message of non-violence and female empowerment in time of war - are playing with fire. Literally.

So how devoted are they really to the principles of non-violence?

(Read Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 

.