How To Settle Political Disputes - Middle East Style

The Palestinians are working out their political differences with hand grenades.

Two Hamas activists were injured Wednesday after a grenade was hurled by a Fatah member at a rally held by Hamas in the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza. Hamas security officers managed to subdue the attacker.

The incident marks the renewal and escalation of the confrontation between the rivaling movements, in the framework of which a Palestinian judge affiliated with Hamas was murdered Wednesday morning.

Which reminds me of a paragraph out of William Burrough's book Naked Lunch

A rout of Mullahs and Muftis and Musseins and Caids and Glaouis and Sheiks and Sultans and Holy Men and representatives of every conceivable Arab party make up the rank and file and attend the actual meetings from which the higher ups prudently abstain. Though the delegates are carefully searched at the door, these gatherings invariably culminate in riots. Speakers are often doused with gasoline and burned to death, or some uncouth desert Sheik opens up on his opponents with a machine gun he had concealed in the belly of a pet sheep. Nationalist martyrs with grenades up the ass mingle with the assembled conferents and suddenly ex- plode, occasioning heavy casualties.... And there was the occasion when President Ra threw the British Prime Minister to the ground and forcibly sodomized him, the spectacle being televised to the entire Arab World. Wild yipes of joy were heard in Stockholm. Interzone has an ordinance forbidding a meeting of Islam Inc. within five miles of the city limits.

Naked Lunch came out in 1959. Some things never change.