Why Juliano Mer-Khamis' murder is unlikely to be 'solved'
The Guardian reports that a leaflet in Jenin this week justified the murder of Juliano Mer-Khamis, the Jewish (via his mother), 'Palestinian' (via his father) theater director who was murdered in broad daylight in Jenin last week. That makes it unlikely that the 'Palestinian Authority' will bother trying to
punish the killer.
Inside the camp, rebuilt since its partial destruction in 2002, people were reluctant to speak about Mer-Khamis. A group of elderly women sitting by the roadside, gave their opinion: "God only knows what happened but the theatre was a shameful place."
A butcher was more forthcoming. Standing in a small room with a portrait of Saddam Hussein and a sparsely stocked cold cabinet, he said he and others were offended by the theatre. "We are Muslims. We have traditions. We looked for our children and found them at the theatre dancing. If he came here to bring jobs that would be good but instead he comes here to corrupt our girls and make women of our boys," he said.
The leaflet justifying the killing of Mer-Khamis also demands the closure of the theatre and other western organisations, including the British Kenyon Institute, under threat of "jihadi action".
The leaflet attacks Mer-Khamis for his belief in co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians, "as if we could live with those who stole our land and killed our children".
It goes on to attack his plays: "What kind of resistance [to occupation] is the play Animal Farm, which made the young men of Palestine bark like dogs and lick the ground in shame and the young women wear the costumes of pigs and roll around the ground in degeneracy?"
The leaflet describes Mer-Khamis as a Jew, a communist and an infidel. "He was not killed for a scene in a play. He was killed for the accumulation of his activities since he came here," it says.
Mer-Khamis's most recent project, Spring Awakening, is singled out for particular criticism. The play by Frank Wedekind was banned in Germany in 1891 for its portrayal of teenage sexuality. In recent years a musical adaptation won awards in London and New York.
The leaflet then refers to a telephone conversation between Mer-Khamis and the Arab-Israeli actor, Makram Khouri, in which Khouri advises his friend not to stage the play. According to theatre staff, very few people were aware of the conversation.
The leaflet then praises the man from Jenin refugee camp who carried out the killing. "He did not do it with a silencer, or in the dark but in broad daylight, face to face, and he made sure not to harm the woman and child who were in the car at the time," the leaflet says.
Palestinian police say that their investigation into the murder continues.
Islamic society kills those who do not conform. Literally. Why Mer-Khamis ever thought it would be otherwise is not clear.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Islamic terrorism, Jenin, Juliano Mer Khamis, Palestinian intolerance
Death of a pacifist
Some of you may recall a post I wrote last week about Juliano Mer Khamis, the pacifist son of an Arab father and a Jewish mother who was murdered on the streets of Jenin by Arabs who
didn't like his theater.
Italian journalist Giulio Meotti, who has become an
expert on the victims of Israel's terror wars, pens an op-ed for YNet in which he discusses a man whose
idealistic pacifism did not save him from the scourge of 'Palestinian' Arab terrorism.
Mer’s lineage comprises the entire history of Israel’s anti-Zionist Left. He was the son of an Arab Christian who was among the founders of the Communist Party, the Red Bolshevik utopia that rejected the Zionist plan, was loyal to Moscow and pushed for a bi-national state.
The director’s Jewish mother was a pacifist icon, Arna Mer, who during the Intifada went to Jenin to create the “Theater of the Stones”, an experimental group for Palestinian children where Mer-Khamis also worked.
Arna Mer won the “Alternative Nobel Prize” given annually by the Swedish Parliament to humanitarian activists. She preferred to be called “Palestinian,” not Jew or Israeli. She was arrested several times during riots protesting Israeli policy in the Territories. She said that “Zionism is a racist ideology.”
Yet all of Mer-Khamis' pacifism, idealism and radicalism did not protect him from the genocidal ideology that Israel had to confront since its foundation. Just like Massoud Mahlouf Allon, an observant Jewish immigrant from Morocco, wasn't spared by the terrorists because he was giving blankets to poor Palestinians. And how can we forget all the Israeli kibbutzniks and pacifists decimated in buses and cafés during the Second Intifada?
The above attacks were all the more chilling because the victims were people willing to give up land for the sake of coexistence; they believed in a moral, just, democratic, egalitarian, better Israel.
...
When Arna Mer-Khamis started her experimental theater, it comprised six Palestinian boys. Five of them have died as suicide bombers and “martyrs.” Now the black hole of hatred has also swallowed up the beautiful Israeli son of this dark utopia.
Mer-Khamis' body was transferred through a checkpoint to Israeli authorities. It was his sad return to reality. The ancient Greek Thucydides said that it is normal for children to bury their parents, but parents burying children contravene the laws of nature and anger the gods. That's the most important and saddest difference between Israel and the rest of the "civilized world." Hatred doesn't differentiate among Jewish targets.
I consider myself pretty jaded. There is very little about this region that surprises me. That five out of six statistic surprised me greatly. It probably tells you all you need to know.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Giulio Meotti, Juliano Mer Khamis
Jewish 'Israeli Arab' actor murdered in Jenin
Jewish 'Israeli Arab' actor
Juliano Mer Khamis was murdered by masked 'Palestinians' outside the theater company he founded in Jenin (northern Samaria) on Monday.
Mer Khamis, 52, was the son of a Jewish mother and an Arab father - a rarity in a land where the two populations almost never intermarry. His split identity fueled a long career as an actor and a vocal activist against Israel's policies toward the Palestinians, with whom he had come increasingly to identify.
But some Palestinians objected to the theater in principle. He reported threats, and the theater was vandalized.
The theater's program director, Samia Staiti, told The Associated Press that she saw the killing. "He was on his way to his car when a masked man stopped him, shot him and ran away."
Staiti said he had received death threats from people in the community who felt he was going against "conservative Palestinian traditions."
"They are trying to kill what Juliano tried to spread - peace and freedom. We will keep on going on," Staiti said.
He starred in several critically acclaimed Israeli films, and also appeared in the 1984 American film "The Little Drummer Girl."
In 2006, he opened an amateur theater company in Jenin, a city that had been torn by violence since the second Palestinian uprising began six years earlier.
With the uprising fizzling out by that point, the company, known as the Freedom Theater, was meant partly as a way of restoring normalcy to the town's youth and opening their minds to the world beyond the harshness of their surroundings.
In the largely quiet years since, Jenin - like much of the West Bank - has become more safe and prosperous, making Monday's shooting all the more shocking.
Mer Khamis was an
Israeli citizen.
Mer-Khamis' mother, Arna Mer, was an Israeli Jewish activist for Palestinian rights. His father, Saliba Khamis, was a Christian Palestinian. Mer-Khamis was born and raised in Nazareth.
...
Based in Israel, Mer-Khamis was affiliated with the local theater in Jenin, established by his mother in the 1980s. In 2006, Mer-Khamis opened the Freedom Theater in Jenin, along with Zakariya Zubeidi, the former military leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades in that West Bank city.
Zubeidi was appointed co-theater director in an attempt to subdue the ongoing threats voiced against both the institution and Mer-Khamis. The theater itself was torched twice in the past, and the threats persisted despite Zubeidei's appointment.
Some of the criticism focused on the fact that the theater offered co-ed activities, despite prohibition in the Islamic moral code.
Objectors were also outraged when Mer-Khamis staged the play "Animal Farm", in which the young actors played the part of a pig, which Islam considers an impure animal.
Mer Khamis said he had planned to stage The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a satire of armed resistance, but shelved the idea after someone smashed the window of his car.
The real story here is that someone (Hamas?) is worried that Jenin isn't Islamist enough. But that's unlikely to get the international media too excited. It's not something for which Jews can be blamed.
Labels: Hamas, Jenin, Juliano Mer Khamis, Palestinian Islamization
The Guardian reports that a leaflet in Jenin this week justified the murder of Juliano Mer-Khamis, the Jewish (via his mother), 'Palestinian' (via his father) theater director who was murdered in broad daylight in Jenin last week. That makes it unlikely that the 'Palestinian Authority' will bother trying to punish the killer. 
