Dear Israeli People:
Shukran! Shukran! Shukran! A million and one thanks and our most sincere appreciation for the enormous strides you are taking. Our gratefulness is beyond measure; the value we put on those gestures will be returned to you ten-fold in days to come.
Shukran! How else can we express our overwhelming gratitude to your government for approving and consequently releasing us along with hundreds of our compatriots. Let bygones be bygones indeed!
Shukran! We, Hamas and Jihad members from Nablus and Ramallah and Gaza and Hebron, were incarcerated in your prisons on false accusations such as the lie that we participated in what your media labeled a hotel homicide-bombing on Passover in 2002 — though it certainly was a glorious night for a friend who committed the holy task of becoming a shahid.
You also accused and convicted us for planning the bombing of the #15 bus as well as the bombings in Netanya, Afula and that restaurant in Haifa. Festive occasions all, as more compatriots joined our roster of martyrs, but how unjustly you treated us! All in all, you have credited us with twenty-two so-called terrorist episodes in which 342 of your wretched people met their well-deserved fate.
Allah will never forgive you for arresting us during the evening prayers, nor will you be spared his wrath for killing three of those civilians we were hiding behind. You defiled the Mosque you entered; the sin will haunt you forever. The killing of innocent Palestinian civilians is an offense which Islam will avenge. To forgive may be divine — but we never will.
But today we send you our sincere and unqualified thanks. Shukran — for the wise decision your cabinet made; the release of hundreds of falsely incarcerated freedom fighters is a move in the right direction. The bumps on the path to implementing the road map must be smoothed out in order for us to proceed — not in the direction you Israelis stupidly envision, but in the direction so clearly specified in our organization’s charter.
The release is a signal that our struggle is succeeding; step by step, inch by inch, the government of Israel is buckling under the pressure. Today you are releasing those whom you claim maimed and hurt and wounded; tomorrow will bring the release of those you say have Jewish blood on their hands.
Please do continue laying on the tracks as the onrushing train that has left the station thunders toward its final destination. The state of Palestine is rising — while your rogue nation is developing more cracks than shattered pottery. Your resolve has dissolved; you allow us back on the streets to plan the next act of holy martyrdom which you insist on labeling ‘homicide bombing’ and the like.
We still vow, of course, to turn your entire country into one large cemetery. The difference is, your prime minister — the one we once hated — has changed his spots. Lately, in our prayers, we reverently mention his name: May Allah keep and preserve Ariel Sharon!
Shukran! Today you have relented, tomorrow victory shall be ours. We knew that your initial rejection of the demand that you release our members would soon fall apart, and indeed it has. Time and time again you have succumbed to threats and pressure; today is no different.
Shukran! How can we ever repay you for your monumental self-delusion, Mr. Prime Minister? With the help of Allah, we will press on. The lessons of the near and distant past seem to have made little impression on you and your people. The ghetto mentality is so deeply imbedded in the Jewish psyche that strutting your imaginary supremacy and military power is mere self-delusion.
We shall meet again, we promise you; the blood-soaked earth begs for more and we shall quickly oblige with greater ferocity.
Sharon, the lion, mews like a kitten.
Shukran!
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