Palestinian University Honors Terrorist Murderer Of Three With Human Reading Chain

Palestinian students and supporters of the Hamas movement campaign for the student council
HAZEM BADER/AFP/Getty

TEL AVIV – A Palestinian university has commemorated a terrorist who killed three Israeli commuters with a “human reading chain” in his honor. The terrorist himself once organized such a chain around Jerusalem, Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reported.

Hebron University called Baha Alyan, who boarded a bus in Jerusalem with fellow terrorist Bilal Ghanem and attacked passengers with knives and a gun, a “martyr” and a “fighter” whose dream was to “create a reading culture in a society which suffers from the bitterness of occupation.”

The host of the Feb 1 ceremony explained that the event, in which hundreds of students reading books formed a chain, was in order “to complete the mission [Alyan] started.” He went on to say that students of the university are using their “belief in the pen and the book as means to convey our Palestinian message to the world.”

PMW noted that the cynical idea of using “the pen and the book” to convey a “Palestinian message” stands in stark contrast to Alyan’s deadly use of a gun and knife to convey a Palestinian message of murder.

Ahlam Abayat, the activity coordinator and a student of journalism and communications at Hebron University explained the purpose of the event:

“Our objective is to commemorate the Martyr’s idea, and to encourage awareness and culture, to introduce the reading culture into society and to prove that our Martyrs are not just numbers, but had their own ideas and dreams, and goals for which they strived just as any other living person.”

WAFA, the official Palestinian news agency, added that the murderer “believed in life, loved Palestine, and acted to strengthen the role of the young,” and that his body, which is being held in Israel, is “still pulsating with the warmth of life!”

The news wire praised Alyan “as an intellectual, a reader, and above all – a Shahid [martyr] and a fighter, and this was in order to fulfill one of his greatest dreams: to create a reading culture in a society which suffers from the bitterness of occupation and cultural and economic colonialism in its most criminal forms.”

Alyan was shot and killed by an Israeli security guard at the scene of the attack, while Ghanem, a Hamas terrorist who served time in an Israeli jail from 2013-2014, was arrested.

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