From Reuters, with thanks to Miriam:
GAZA, May 10 (Reuters) - Palestinians with axes and shovels desecrated 33 graves in a Commonwealth war cemetery in the Gaza Strip to protest against reported abuses of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. and British soldiers, witnesses said on Monday.Reprinted photographs of soldiers apparently mistreating and humiliating Iraqi detainees were affixed to dozens of untouched gravestones in the British-administered cemetery in Gaza City for 3,661 soldiers who died in two world wars.
Palestinian militant factions said they had nothing to do with the assault in the well-maintained cemetery dotted with flower beds, saying Islam forbade attacks on sites of the deceased regardless of religion or politics.
Essam Jeradeh, head gardener at the cemetery, said he and relatives who have tended the site for decades as a family business noticed about eight people standing by some graves some distance away on Sunday evening.
"At first we thought they were visitors paying respects. But as we approached we realised they were sabotaging the graves. We ran at them, screaming, and they fled," he told Reuters on Monday amid tombstones broken into pieces or toppled intact.
"They (the dead) had been sleeping here for 90 years and no one disturbed them," said Jeradeh, whose father was awarded a British MBE for his care of the cemetery established in 1917.
Photographs pasted on other tombstones showed a U.S. soldier dragging an Iraqi prisoner along a floor with a leash and a British soldier apparently urinating on a detainee.
"The curse will chase you forever" and "we shall avenge" were scrawled in Arabic on some of the photographs.
"These posters show it was an act of anger over the images coming from Iraqi prisons," said Jeradeh's son Ibrahim.
"We have been informed that several graves were desecrated last night at the Imperial War Graves Commission Cemetery in Gaza. We are investigating," a British embassy spokesman in nearby Israel said.
The desecration of graves, like the mutilation of bodies, is a staple expression of Muslim fury. What lends this particular episode a certain piquancy is, for those who remember that bizarre episode, Yasser Arafat's grand appeal to have his "Palestine" admitted as a member of the British Commonwealth. This absurd idea seems to rest on the fact that Mandatory Palestine was, of course, a Mandate entrusted to Great Britain. What Arafat chose to overlook (and he is joined in this overlooking by most of the world) is that the Mandate for Palestine was entrusted to Great Britain for the sole purpose of the establishment of the Jewish National Home. By its own terms, the solemn commitments which the mandatory power assumed, Great Britain was to facilitate Jewish immigration into the area (in fact, it did everything it could to discourage Jewish immigration, which was far outweighed by Arab immigration, legal and illegal, from 1918 to 1948), and to "encourage close Jewish settlement on the land." (So much for all that nonsense about "illegal Jewish settlements" -- they were expressly to be encouraged under the terms of the Palestine Mandate itself).
Well, Arafat has his troupe of "Palestinian" bag-pipers. And he had his little dream of joining the Commonwealth. That dream seems to have faded; the Jihad is not going according to schedule. And instead of becoming citizens of a state that is part of the Commonwealth, the "Palestinian" Arabs seem to have vented their wrath on English, Australian, New Zealand, and Indian troops -- that is to say, their tombstones and their remains. A perfectly predictable act, that should surprise no one. And please let us not hear that this, too, is "not Islamic." It is Islamic up to the hilt.
This is just like the looting during the LA riots, stealing the TVs had nothing to do with the verdict, they just did it to steal....desecrating the graves had nothing to do with the "abuse" (and I use that term loosly) they just did it because the opportunity arose.
Hugh:
Two nights back, the Left/"liberal", Government-run Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News reported here in Sydney that only British war-graves in Gaza were desecrated, but not ANZAC ones.
(The ABC is the little sister of the BBC, so there are selected areas of coverage - specifically the Middle East and the UN - where its accounts, or lack of them, sometimes ought to be taken with at least a grain of salt.)
Though Australia's a staunch, competent, founding member of the "coalition of the willing", with roughly 800 personnel on station in Iraq, NZ's dominated by soft-leftists, pacifists and Greens (watermelons: green outside, red inside), sending just a token contingent of non-combat units, late in the Allied occupation.
While thereby assuming a slightly better stance than Canada towards the conflict in Iraq, over the years NZ has virtually pulled out of the ANZUS Agreement and refused to replace its obsolete RNZAF fighter-jets, decreasing its Army and Navy strength to the point that they had barely adequate forces to insert into East Timor in its moment of dire need, scraping together several dozen (more than despatched to Iraq recently).
Granted, with Australia sheltering it, NZ faces negligible threats, but that's hardly a good reason to reject meaningful contributions to its international security responsibilities. Down in Te Airoa, they'd prefer to dream than to open their eyes to the real world.
"When you go home, tell them of us, and say
That for their tomorrow, we gave our today."
Epitaph of the Commonwealth war cemetary at Kohima