Palestinians Lynched as Collaborators
 

From:  "Sam Ghandchi" <ghandchi@yahoo.com>
Date:  Wed Apr 24, 2002  11:03 pm
Subject:  FW: Palestinians lynched as collaborators

So far in the current intifada 150 people have been lynched and in the previous intifada 800 of those so-called collaborators were lynched. The other sad part is that they teach their kid to do the same by asking them to participate. Read this. They are just like some the Iranian Kurdish liberation forces in early years after the revolution who after the take over of Sanandaj hanged the collaborators (whom they called jAsh in Kurdish).  They had the so-called people's court where they would have the people of the city and say "this guy is a jAsh  and this is why you lost your loved ones, what do you want us to do with him" and people would scream "hang him, hang him" and they would do.  This was just like the people's courts of China and the same justice as Khalkhali's "justice". Real justice is real courts with all the rules with prosecutors and attorneys, etc.  The Iranian democratic forces made a big mistake that they did not ask for fair trials for Hoveyda, Nassiri, and all others of the Shah's regime and they got the same thing themselves three years later.  Justice is justice and does not matter who is being judged.  One should want human rights and open trial even for murderers of Foruhars.

********************News Piece Below************************
Palestinians lynched as collaborators

Crowd gawks at 3 slain men, who are bound, gagged, shot in the head

TEL AVIV -- Hundreds of people gathered in Hebron yesterday morning near the
spot where a Palestinian militant was killed by an Israeli missile hours
before. It was not the slain militiaman they were gawking at.
It was the bodies of three men, bound, gagged and shot in the head; two of
them hung by their ankles from electrical poles.

The Palestinian crowd, which included many children, spat and jeered at the
corpses. The dead men were alleged to be collaborators, suspected of
providing information that led to the attack on the militia leader, Marwan
Zaloum.

About 150 Palestinians accused of collaborating with the Israelis have been
killed in such lynchings since the intifada (uprising) began 19 months ago,
about 20 of them in the past month. In many parts of the West Bank, where
the Palestinian police force was crushed by the recent Israeli invasion,
there is now nothing to stop frontier justice from taking over.

When one suspected collaborator was shot dead and two others injured in full
view of passersby in Ramallah's main square on Monday, journalists who
arrived moments later recorded a mixture of reactions from the crowd.

"They deserved it," one teenager said. "They talked to Israel."

But when some people tried to stop an ambulance from going to the aid of the
injured men, one man reportedly shouted: "How are we different from the
Israelis who wouldn't allow our wounded to get medical aid?"

In Hebron yesterday, one of the masked men who dumped the bodies amid the
crowd told reporters before he raced off: "The fate of all collaborators
will be like this."

(The practice was even more widespread in the first Palestinian uprising,
from 1987 to 1993, when about 800 suspected collaborators were slain,
accounting for about a third of all Palestinian deaths related to that
uprising.)

No one knows how many informants have been recruited by the Israeli
intelligence agencies, including the Shin Bet, but the numbers must be in
the hundreds if not the thousands.

With most Palestinians unemployed, and many linked to Israel through social
and economic ties, it has not been hard for the Israelis to recruit
informers, reportedly often in exchange for small sums of money or even
non-monetary favours.

The Israeli public often gets warnings that a suicide bomber is on the way
to a particular region, and police frequently successfully intercept them
before they get there; it is generally assumed such information comes mainly
from Palestinian informers.