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Heaven On Earth
One Picture is Worth a Thousand Words I: Mourning in the Embrace of Hamas
This photo, taken a couple of days after she lost her father and most of her family on a Gaza beach, shows Palestinian icon Houda Ghouri posing with a Hamas leader (i.e., in all probability the people who are responsible, intentionally or not, for her family’s tragedy).
This picture accords with the account of the Suddeutsche Zeitung reporter, Thorsten Schmitz that the young girl asked the cameraman to catch her grief: “She asked me to film her. She wanted to be seen with her father and show the whole world what crimes Israel commits.”
Would she have asked to show the crimes of Hamas? Is Houda a classic product of the Palestinian education system that has kindergarten graduation ceremonies like this?
[Young girl performing graduation ceremony where she and her classmates mimick the behavior of the Palestinian who, after savagely killing two Israeli reservists in Ramallah on October 12, 2000, came to the window and showed his bloody hands to the cheering crowd who were chanting, "Revenge for Muhammad al Durah".]
Obviously, Houda is a sterling example of the PA education system, doing the next best thing to being a martyr herself. Give her a little time, and she’ll be recruited for an operation and doing her best to massacre Israelis and Jews, even if the world finally twigs to the truth.
that would be the ultimate in bitter ironies: houda does a suicide bombing to avenge her family’s death at the handds of hamas.
It’s the pedophile defense. The cameraman – rather than comforting the allegedly grief-stricken child or helping the wounded – decides to take her picture at her request? This child has fantastic presence of mind and inhuman self control, as well as a wonderful sense of the historical importance of the tragedy. The pedophile defense often boils down to “she wanted it and she made me do it”. But that’s only when he doesn’t claim that he was drunk at the time and didn’t know what he was doing. This photographer has it down pat.
it does explain why, when confronted with the question of why he didn’t seek to comfort her, he blamed it on her, without seeming to realize that it deeply compromises the nature of the evidence. in particular, i noticed a detail which i haven’t seen yet remarked on: after throwing herself into the sand several yards from her “father”, Houda made her way over to her father. Before actually coming close, she sat up, slapped her thighs, then quickly wiped the sand off her blouse and then off her face. these do not strike me as the gestures of a child so wild with grief that she doesn’t notice the camera.