Terrorism Quilt

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a Ramallah organization that is constructing a quilt where each panel commemorates a shahid "who Palestinians say has been killed since the second intifada erupted against Israel in September 2000".

"While the commemoration makes no distinction between Palestinian fighers and civilians who died," the quilt's director insists that suicide bombers have been excluded. The quilt, which seems to have been inspired by the AIDS quilt, is presumably created for public relations purposes to play to a western audience. Its promoters didn't want to "create a false debate about suicide bombers by including them. It would have taken away from the message"

Since non-suicide-bombing Palestinian fighters are included we can only wonder what sorts of grisly crimes these "fighters" might have committed. But the reporter, who apparently didn't want to "take away from the message" either, tells us only about two of the (female) civilians who are on the quilt, like a 21-year-old secretary who was shot "as she passed through an Israeli controlled checkpoint in a car with friends". That is to say that her "friend" who was driving the car chose not to stop at the checkpoint and therefore created a reasonable fear in the minds of the soldiers staffing the checkpoint that the car might be full of, say, aspiring shahids.

What do the quilt panels look like? The pictures [newspaper only, not online] don't give us a good look, but we are told that at least one "has a picture of a winged map of Palestine rising from a pierced Israeli flag" The quilt director, never wanting to take away from the message, "prefers to describe the iconography as existential rather than political"

The Palestinian flag "is who you are," she said. "This is all about the struggle for perception. Israelis are perceived as the survivors of the Holocaust and we are faceless -- at best, terrorists.

Go figure.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at August 02, 2002 07:16 AM