Word: mansourism
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About seven weeks ago, an Israeli helicopter flew into the West Bank town of Nablus, targeting two leaders of the Palestinian terrorist organization known as Hamas. The two men, Jamal Mansour and Jamal Salim, were instantly killed. Four other men in the Hamas offices and two young boys standing outside were also fatally wounded when the choppers fired...
...Israel asked Arafat to arrest a group of Palestinians it accused of terrorist activity. Salim was among them. Two weeks ago, he was in the mourning tent for Salah Darwazeh, a Hamas activist killed by an Israeli missile. Salim watched as his colleague in the Hamas leadership, Sheik Jamal Mansour, addressed the mourners. "This week you are seeing images of the martyrdom of Darwazeh!" the sheik yelled into the microphone. "Next week you might see my martyrdom." The only Hamas leader in the West Bank with more influence than Salim, Mansour died at his side in the helicopter attack...
Arafat's Palestinian Authority tried to take some of the edge off the anger. With good reason. Much of the rage was aimed at Arafat's police for failing to protect Salim and Mansour. Within hours of the attack, Arafat's security court sentenced three men to death for allegedly collaborating with Israel. The judicial process was not much less swift or more formal than actions on the streets of West Bank towns; in the three days after the Israeli attack, lynch mobs murdered four other suspected collaborators. Hamas vowed it would take revenge. This terrible summer, the number...
...Hawks' demonstration inflamed Arafat's opponents in Gaza. "This show of muscle was a big mistake," said Mansour Shawa, president of the charitable Benevolent Society for the Gaza Strip. "It just provoked a lot of people." By aligning himself with a factional militia, critics said, the chairman had undercut his claim to be a national leader. "He is going back to acting like the head of a gang," said Ghazi Abu Jayyab, an activist in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Bloody Friday also tainted the image of the Authority's 9,000-member Gaza Strip security force...
...meantime, the situation in Gaza remains perilous. Warns Mansour Shawa: "If the path is not corrected, we are heading for calamity. Any future confrontation -- any -- will lead to widespread violence." Whatever the remedy, it had better come quickly, lest the slogans on Gaza's walls turn out to be prophetic...