Reply #3: I know I have the minority view here...

[ProgressiveMuslim]

but when I read the original story, I felt a little sick. I didn't post on the orignal thread, preferring to keep my negative view to myself.

Would you have felt positively if little black South Africans were pulled out of Soweto to play for elderly Afrikaners? 2 months after the Afrikaner gov't massacred hundres of black South African children?

The paralles are endless and I won't make them here.

From the NYT: "Debating the rights and wrongs of the conflict among themselves, some of the elderly Israelis commented that the Palestinian musicians were 'only children' and were not to blame."

Wow. How generous of them.

From the CSMonitor: "They have a difficult past and we have a difficult past," says Keren Naiomi, a native of Poland who lost her entire family at the age of 5 and then was sent to a concentration camp. "They're from a refugee camp and we're from a concentration camp." For many of the Palestinian young people, who come from a neighborhood that was leveled by an Israeli invasion seven years ago, the rare permits to cross legally into Israel stirred excitement first and foremost – mostly about their first visit to the beach and to the land that their grandparents and parents called home before Israel was created in 1948.

One big difference is that the Palestinians had to return to the camp after they entertained.

Blech.