[A guest post by Irving Miller.]

There will be a riot in the Ramallah suburb of Bil'in tomorrow. There is one every Friday, because Fatah likes it that way.

Many weeks they are very small, with a mix of PA employees and jihad tourists along for the thrill. Anti-Israel activists take videos and post them on youtube.

If you look at the video of a typical Friday in Bil'in, April 2, 2010, you see the blond jihad tourists, the banners, and the speeches. Then the crowd marches towards the separation barrier. At 1:23 you see them dismantle part of the fence. The elimination of the security barrier that has prevented so many suicide bombings is the goal of these demonstrations.

At 1:30 and 1:57 you see young men throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. At 2:06 a man uses a slingshot. Stones and slingshots are lethal weapons, for that matter, a baseball is is a lethal weapon; it can kill you. In the April 2 video more stones are thrown at 2:22 and at another slingshot at 2:47. Most of these films, however, edit out images of Palestinian men slinging rocks at Israelis. According to Neil Rogachevsky, this is made easier by the fact that the men attacking with stones and slingshots stand apart from the jihad tourists and photographers.

In this map of the riot area published in hardcopy in Haaretz and posted on the Elder of Ziyon blog you can see an area marked 4 where what Haaretz calls "children" are throwing stones. This is nice gender-neutral language, but the "children" throwing stones are all boys and lots of the stone-throwers are grown men. I will be ethnically-neutral and give these men credit for being able to throw a stone as hard as other men. Hard enough to kill you.

The Roman Army had a slingshot corps. The slingshot boys of Bil'in show up every week, that is why the Israeli army shows up in helmets with riot shields. The IDF now begins to shoot water from high-pressure hoses and tear gas tear gas before the shouting, rock-wielding crowd gets out of hand. Looking at tapes of some of the earlier Bil'in demonstrations, you understand why.

In this propaganda video of a the Friday, February 23, 2007 riot in Bil'in, the early stages of the pushing and shoving have been edited out, but at 0:15 you see a tangled melee of soldiers and protesters. Imagine what the Syrian army would have done with a crowd like that.

The video ends as the IDF allows the rioters to dismantle a symbolic section of the security barrier and carry it off in triumph.

Because this sort of thing gets boring week after week, and even The Guardian stops sending reporters. So Fatah stages publicity stunts. On Christmas Eve this year in Bil'in a lot of Palestinians in Santa Claus suits threw stones.

Peace on earth...