The Economist says al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade Criminal is a HERO

(H/T Media Backspin) Zakaria Zubeidi is a big-shot in the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade. For those of you who are not familiar with the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade Some notable suicide bombings committed by the group were:

March 2, 2002: Beit Yisrael, Jerusalem - 11 killed. January 5, 2003: Southern Tel Aviv central bus station - 22 killed. January 29, 2004: Rehavia, Jerusalem, bus line 19 - 11 killed. March 14, 2004: Port of Ashdod - 10 killed (together with Hamas). And don't forget that they were also responsible for many of the Kassams fired at Sederot.

Zakaria Zubeidi is one of the Cowards that sent some of those people to blow themselves up. Zakaria Zubeidi is one of the Cowards that ordered people to send missiles toward nursery schools in Sedrot. Zakaria Zubeidi is a Murderer...but the Economist calls him a Hero. The Economist editors need a vocabulary lesson.... Zakaria Zubeidi is NO HERO.

The West Bank pimpernel pops up
Jul 19th 2007 | RAMALLAH
From The Economist print edition
A Palestinian hero ceases fire—but for how long?

ISRAEL rarely tells wanted Palestinian militants that they are wanted; they usually learn of their status from the business end of a guided missile. The list of 180 men to whom Israel offered amnesty in a deal with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, was for many the first proof that it had them in its sights. But there were never any doubts about Zakaria Zubeidi.

A charismatic 31-year-old with a face blackened and pockmarked, reputedly by what Palestinians call a “work accident” (a mistake with a bomb), he leads the al-Aqsa Brigades, the militias loyal to Mr Abbas's Fatah party, in the northern West Bank town of Jenin. Israeli soldiers first shot him at the age of 13, when he was throwing stones at them in the first intifada, and he has survived several attempts to kill him since. In the 1980s he starred in a children's theatre set up in Jenin by an Israeli peace activist, which became a model of co-existence. But one by one his fellow actors saw their friends killed and arrested, took up arms and died or were locked up. Mr Zubeidi joined the brigades full-time after an Israeli raid in 2002 that flattened a swathe of Jenin's refugee camp and, according to the UN, killed 52 people (about half of them fighters, half civilians), itself a response to a Palestinian suicide-bomber who had killed 29 Israelis. It was after that, he said, when his Israeli peacenik friends stopped calling, that he lost faith in the peace movement.

This amnesty is not the first attempt to co-opt unruly militants. Many members of the brigades have been in and out of the Palestinian security forces; Mr Zubeidi was briefly in the police. But his branch of the brigades has been suspicious of the Palestinian Authority, and of Mr Abbas, ever since Yasser Arafat's death in 2004. If they think the deal with Israel risks sullying their image as fighters for the Palestinian cause, they—and Mr Zubeidi—will be first to break ranks.