Word: butcherings
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Forty years on, Omar is entering middle age, and so is Palestinian nationalism. Omar is a butcher, with sinewy forearms, a black mustache and sad, dark eyes. He buys his meat from Jews and counts several of them as his friends. "They live in Haifa, and I was worried about them during the war last summer when the Hizballah rockets were falling," he says. "I told them that they could stay with us!" Omar likes the novel idea of his Jewish buddies taking shelter inside a Palestinian refugee camp, and I ask him if Jews and Palestinians are so different...
...that when I visited Jalazon recently, they were commemorating the nakba and the naksa rolled into one. Indeed, when I press Omar to talk about the war he was born into, his thoughts leap to 1948, as though one event were indistinguishable from the other. He lays down his butcher's knife and shows me a 2007 wall calendar with a photograph of an old stone schoolhouse in Beit Nabala, his ancestral village. "The water in Beit Nabala was sweet, and the earth was so rich that beans grew overnight like magic," he marvels. Has Omar ever visited...
...butcher's feelings toward the former Palestinian leader are contradictory. Omar has heard the tales of the corruption that dogged Arafat and his entourage, of the missing millions in aid money. But he remains loyal to Arafat and insists, along with his friends, that I tour a museum in the camp whose showpiece is a photo display of Arafat in his many guises, from bug-eyed terrorist to statesman. Omar rushes me past a photo of Arafat shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin; he thinks Arafat gave away too much to the Israelis, as do many Palestinians still...
...including up-close studies of Idi Amin Dada and Koko the talking gorilla. His new film, Terror's Advocate, is a biopic of Jacques Vergès, the French lawyer who has defended many of the 20th century's most notorious miscreants, from Carlos the Jackal to the Nazi "Butcher of Lyon," Klaus Barbie. Asked if he would defend Hitler, Vergès replies, "I'd even defend Bush. Of course he'd have to admit his guilt first." The answer is flippant, but it points to a question posed by this meticulous, powerful film: Why is the violence committed...
...many residents of these neighborhoods question the motives behind such ventures. "These projects are entirely for the bobos," says Michel Langlois, the Montmartre butcher, referring to bourgeois-bohemians - a distinctive breed of middle-class Parisians who, in recent years, have moved to traditionally poorer areas of the city to take advantage of cheaper property. Besides Montmartre, favorite "bobo" haunts include the 10th Arrondissement where designer strollers navigate deftly around the tents that shelter the homeless along the St. Denis Canal. "Yes, people can roller-blade more easily now but there's little regard for the impact of these projects...