As W.C. Fields stated in his own epitaph: [Hell] Beats Philadelphia on a Sunday!
Hamas leader has strong tie to West Phila. By Michael Matza Inquirer Staff Writer http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/14182015.htm RAMALLAH, West Bank - The motorcade carrying Abdel Aziz Dweik, newly elected speaker of the Hamas-controlled Palestinian legislature, was weaving through traffic on its way to a downtown news conference. Bodyguards in the lead vehicle looked back nervously every few seconds, making sure that Dweik's black Mercedes was keeping up. Two days earlier, Israeli troops, backed by tanks, armored bulldozers and helicopter gunships, had raided the Palestinian prison in Jericho. The soldiers forced the detainees to strip to their underwear before arresting six men implicated in the murder of an Israeli cabinet minister and in weapons smuggling. Now Dweik, who praises Philadelphia as his favorite U.S. city after earning two graduate degrees 20 years ago from the University of Pennsylvania, was before the microphones at a prisoners' rights news conference. "We saw them naked and down to their underwear, and it brought to our minds the images of those who were humiliated in Abu Ghraib prison [in Iraq]," he said, denouncing the United States and Britain for withdrawing their prison monitors, thus facilitating the Israeli raid. "This means we cannot trust any kind of an agreement with the Israelis, and we cannot consider the U.S.A. and the British government as unbiased brokers to solve the problems of the Middle East," Dweik said. For this first-time politician, who says his job is "to reflect the pulse of the Palestinian people," biting commentary, delivered softly and with a smile, is all in a day's work. A career academic with 25 years of experience as a professor of geography and urban studies at An-Najah National University in the West Bank city of Nablus, Dweik was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1948. His father, a secondary-school teacher, was Palestinian. His mother was Egyptian. The family moved to the West Bank city of Hebron shortly after Dweik was born. Dweik, who wears his moustache short and sports a white beard, is highly educated. He earned a bachelor's degree in geography in Jordan and a master's in education from Bethlehem University. Studying on a U.S.-backed scholarship, he earned a master's in urban planning at State University of New York in Binghamton. >From 1985 to 1988, once again on a U.S. grant, he earned a master's and a doctorate in urban planning at Penn. His doctoral dissertation analyzed the reasons Palestinians commuted from the West Bank and Gaza Strip to work in Israel. In a recent interview, he recalled his days in West Philadelphia fondly. Afternoons spent at the Van Pelt Library, reveling in its "millions of books." Forays to buy doughnuts, to which he says he became almost addicted. Communal prayer five times a day with fellow Muslim students in a room on the Penn campus. Dweik said he was accepted at other universities, including one in the Southwest, but he chose Penn for the city's rich history and because being on the East Coast gave him the feeling of being physically closer to his home in the Middle East. "I said Philadelphia is the best. It was the first capital of the United States. So let me go there," he recalled. Moving to a different apartment about once a year, he had roommates from Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Turkey. He can't recall the exact location of the apartments, but "something about Walnut Street" sticks in his mind. He returned to Hebron imbued with democratic values, including a deep respect for freedom of speech. Amid growing Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Dweik began speaking out, "talking about the Palestinian problem as a political problem and calling for the emancipation of our people" at public forums, which got him arrested by Israeli authorities, he said. "When I went to the court, I said, 'Can I defend myself in English?' They said no. So I spoke Arabic, and it was translated, and some of them knew Arabic very well. I said, 'Guys, I was in the United States, saying whatever I like, nobody stopped me there.' " During his four-month incarceration, he met members of Hamas, the radical, frequently violent anti-Israel movement founded in the Gaza Strip in 1988. "I was very much affected by their behavior, by their belief in the Palestinian cause," he recalled. Continuing his activism after his release, Dweik was arrested again, then deported for a year to southern Lebanon in 1992 along with 415 other members of Hamas. In Lebanon he met some of the founders of Hamas, including several who would later be eliminated by Israel in targeted killings. Because Dweik spoke English well, he became the deportees' spokesman in Lebanon for interviews with the English-speaking press. Palestinian political analyst Hisham Ahmed said Dweik's high-profile experience as a spokesman helped prepare him for the role he would assume as speaker of the new legislature, in which Hamas holds 74 of 132 seats. "He doesn't have much political experience outside of Hamas. But he is widely respected within Hamas for his understanding of the objectives of the movement," Ahmed said. A gregarious, soft-spoken man with an easy manner, Dweik can be politically unyielding. He firmly states that all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, even those accused of engineering suicide bombings, are "freedom seekers" who deserve to be released because "Israel has no right to keep us under the slavery of occupation." Among the inmates nabbed in Israel's raid on the Jericho prison was Ahmed Saadat, an official of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who Israel says is the mastermind behind the 2001 assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi. If Dweik could, he would free Saadat. "The Israelis killed many Palestinian people, and they also killed the general secretary of the PFLP, Abu Ali Mustafa. So the PFLP decided to retaliate," Dweik said. "Saadat said there will be a head for a head. A leader for a leader. And this is what happened." It is that sort of attitude, Israel says, that necessitated the raid on the Jericho prison. FAIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this message are copyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. All rights to these copyrighted items are reserved. Articles and graphics have been placed within for educational and discussion purposes only, in compliance with "Fair Use" criteria established in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976. The principle of "Fair Use" was established as law by Section 107 of The Copyright Act of 1976. 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