HAMAS ON DISPLAY

A few days later the PFLP stands had been cleared away and the Hamas women were putting others up in their place.
'Shall we go?' suggested Camelia.
The Hamas exhibition was an odd mixture of market and propaganda, and much jollier than the PFLP one. Students crowded gaily round stalls where hijabs and jilbabs were arrayed alongside glamorous evening dresses. They poked around among the jewellery and the makeup, sampling perfumes from dagger-shaped bottles, testing palettes of eye shadow and blusher, trying on rings and necklaces. They jostled each other at toy stalls and bookstalls, and rummaged in the bric-a-brac of worry beads, olive wood key rings and embroidered goods. Two booths side by side were devoted to the Koran and the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Next to them was an immense polystyrene model of Al Aqsa mosque with a padlocked chain round it. The chain was there, Camelia said, because extremist Jewish elements threatened to destroy the mosque and build something of their own in its place. A cartoon beside it mocked the other Arab countries for standing by and ignoring the plight of the Palestinians. A model pen hung poised over a broken star of David lying in a pool of blood. 'It's meant to show that education is the most effective way of making progress,' said Camelia.
A wall covered in photos of slaughter and atrocity commemorated events from the intifada. In one of them a dead Palestinian lay with his live baby daughter posing beside his head. Another showed a badly injured baby in hospital. Camelia was scathing: 'Of course, the baby was a suicide bomber,' referring to the tendency for Israeli aggression to be justified as a reaction to a perceived threat, even in the most unlikely circumstances.
A big black bin stood crammed with the usual sort of campus rubbish - paper cups, plastic bags, empty drink cans, scrunched up sheets of paper; sticking out it were pieces of card marked Oslo, Geneva, Road Map, a graphic statement that all these agreements, accords and proposals could be consigned to the garbage bin of bad ideas.

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