Based on what the camps of Arabs and lawyers were cooking up as
last year drew to a close, it looks like we won’t be seeing any
letup in explosions in 2004.
The first story came out of the West Bank on Christmas Eve, a
few hours before the pope headed off to the traditional Christmas
midnight Mass at the Vatican to reiterate a call for world peace,
saying, “Too much blood is still being shed on the earth.” The
crowd at St. Peter’s Basilica had to enter through metal
detectors.
“Letter boxes and other possible hiding places for bombs,”
reported Agence France-Presse, “were put out of use on the
Conciliazione avenue leading to the Vatican.”
Inside the basilica, a prayer read in German by a young German
woman, Anna Dueringer, called for a stop in the violence in
“countries martyrized by war and guerrilla activities.” Another
prayer, read in Arabic, called for a halt in “all feeling or action
of hatred, vengeance and violence.”
Meanwhile, while all that was going on, Ali Daraghmeh, a writer
for the Associated Press, reported from the West Bank that playtime
for Palestinian kids isn’t just limited to nice things like
kickball, not when there’s a jihad to be staffed. “Palestinian
children,” reported Daraghmeh, “are collecting cards showing gunmen
and soldiers the way American kids trade baseball cards, and some
educators are concerned that the uprising hobby is helping to breed
a new generation of militants.”
And business is good, says Majdi Taher, a former candy salesman
who makes the cards. All told, about 6 million cards have been sold
over the past two years, plus sales in December alone of 32,000
albums in the two main population centers of the northern West
Bank, with little slots for a kid’s favorite suicide bombers and
other assorted militants.
“The albums are sold in cardboard boxes shaped like Israeli
tanks and include a dedication from Nablus governor Mahmoud Alul,”
wrote Daraghmeh. “A child who fills an album with all 129 pictures
can win a computer, a bicycle, a watch or a hat.”
It works. Overdose on 129 collectable martyrs and killers, stick
some dynamite under your new hat and bicycle off to blow up some
infidels.
Not everyone is happy about the new hobby. Teachers told
Daraghmeh that “the desire to fill the albums has captivated
children in Nablus and Ramallah, keeping them from their homework
as they spend all their money on the cards.” Said Saher Hindi, 28,
a teacher at a Nablus elementary school: “I take hundreds of these
pictures from children every day and burn them. They turn children
into extremists.”
Crazy as it all is, the whole thing works well for those
opportunistic leaders in the Middle East who deliberately seek to
intensify feelings of despair, alienation, humiliation, hatred and
anger in order to recruit young cannon fodder for their kamikaze
operations. No homework, no money, no hope — just the glory of
moral fervor and a supreme act of self-destruction to purify the
world.
THE SECOND STORY, CLOSER TO HOME and with a somewhat different
style of bombing, is about a new strategy that was unveiled right
before Christmas that’s designed to keep the litigation explosion
going full blast across America.
“A new guide for trial lawyers advises them to be wary of
Americans with ‘extreme attitudes about personal responsibility’
when selecting jurors in personal injury lawsuits,” reports Jeff
Johnson, senior staff writer at CNSNews.com. “The author of the
guide says such jurors typically ‘espouse traditional family
values’ and often ‘have strong religious beliefs.’”
The guide’s author, David Wenner, a psychotherapist-turned-trial
lawyer and recently named by the Association of Trial Lawyers of
America to co-chair its Blue Ribbon Committee on Juror Bias, warns
that tort reformers are “stealing the message of personal
responsibility from plaintiffs” in personal injury lawsuits.
Lawyers will have a much better shot at getting millions for
themselves via the fat kids who overdosed at McDonald’s, explains
Wenner, if they divide potential jurors into two groups and ferret
out all those who believe that “people should be self-reliant,
responsible, and self-disciplined.”
Jurors who are “extreme on the personal responsibility bias,”
writes Wenner, “will strongly favor the defendant,” i.e.,
McDonald’s. “In contrast, jurors who are extreme on the
compassionate-altruistic bias, or who have a high need for
compassion, will strongly favor the plaintiff,” i.e., the fat kids
(and their lawyers).
That sounds like jury-stacking to me, or case-fixing, plus
profiling by way of some very shaky generalizations, all for the
purpose, of course, of legalized plunder and money grubbing on an
ever-expanding scale.
All told, it promises to be another wacky year.
