As I’ve said in earlier posts, I am not one that is “in the know” of every detail as it happens in the Middle East. Hopefully, post college, this will change. This morning I was lead into checking news items from the inbox of my Yahoo account. For those with that familiar old mailbox setting, it would give you headlines from Yahoo news upon logging in. Well, I saw a headline reading: Israeli Cabinet Approves Muslim Minister. Immeadiately, I was lost in a tidal wave of reflection of all the images and moments in my mind that are still being processed from my trip there in December. After reading the article, I thought of visiting the Al Jazeera site to try and see what was the current situation over in that part of the world. Just the front page was enough to bring forth the tension of our visit into Gaza City days after 3 children of a Fateh intelligence official were shot in a car. After reading an article about a recent suicide bombing, the first to occur since last April (2006), there was a sidebar link to a reporter who had interviewed both Fateh and Hammas soldiers to gain insight into their motivations for being involved with either side. It is not suprising that each side had accounts of the other being the aggressor and feelings of tit-for-tat until one can be truly dominant. The photographs of the young men decked out in flac vests and guns was just as unnerving to me as it had been while I was there. Never did I get acclimated in a sense of seeing young men walking around in many of the towns we visited with M-16s. At the bottom of the article, a brief description of the reporter brought me to a most promising blog.

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