The Way of All Perps
About 10 minutes into the premiere episode of Steven Bochco's initially thrilling CBS crime series, Brooklyn South, I found myself wishing deeply unpleasant tortures--specifically, tortures involving the nonbusiness end of a toilet plunger--upon the psychopathic black perpetrator who commits the heinous crimes that open the show. This, of course, is what the reactionaries who work on the Bochco police-drama assembly line want me to feel: Nothing like a vicious black perp to get the fear-juice of white America flowing.
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From Peace Process To Police Process
The Imam of the sterile, dust-covered west Bank town of Dura is a knife-thin 38-year-old ascetic known to his followers simply as Sheik Nayef. He is a graduate in Sharia (Islamic law) of the University of Jordan, and he is also a leader of Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist movement. Dura, like Hebron, its neighbor to the west, is the sort of place that accords honor to Palestinian men who choose to end their lives--and the lives of as many Jews as technically feasible--by detonating nail-packed bombs strapped to their bodies.
Sheik Nayef, whose last name is Rajoub, wears the full beard of the Hamas loyalist, and he carries himself with the aloof serenity associated with that archetype of Islamic fundamentalism, the blind cleric. I met him on Aug. 10, the 11th day of the Israeli Army's closure of the West Bank, 11 days after two men in black suits exploded bombs in the center of the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem, killing 14 civilians, and four weeks before three bombs tore through a pedestrian mall in the city. An offshoot of Hamas, calling itself the "Martyrs for Freeing Prisoners," took responsibility for both attacks. I asked Sheik Nayef to tell me what Sharia has to say about suicide bombing.
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Jerusalem Dispatch: Unorthodox Riot
The border policeman gives me a hard push to the chest and then answers my question. "Of course I'm Jewish," he says. He has pushed me into an old woman, who loses her Hebrew prayer book and her balance. Beside me, a reporter falls to the ground and is stepped on by the police. It is the evening of Tishah b'Av at the Western Wall, and Jewish policemen, by order of the Jewish government of Benjamin Netanyahu, are shoving and beating a group of Conservative Jews off the Western Wall Plaza. It is like a Jewish soccer riot.
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Prisoners
