Wednesday, February 08, 2006

That Old Entrepreneurial Spirit

You have to hand it to Gaza City shopkeeper Ahmed Abu Dayya for sheer chutzpah. Okay, maybe chutzpah isn't quite the right word.

In any event, Abu Dayya ordered 100 hard-to-find Danish and Norwegian flags for his customers to burn as soon as he got wind of the Danish Cartoon Controvery, which has now been elevated to the Danish Cartoon Crisis.

"I do not take political stands," Abu Dayya told Reuters. "But this time I was offended by the assault on the Prophet Mohammad."

Abu Dayya sells the flags for $11 apiece, which is a fair chunk of change for a Palestinian, so some prefer to make the flags themselves from scraps of fabric and then burn them.

Abu Dayya gets some of his flags from Taiwan, but buys Israeli flags from a merchant in Israel, even though he sells them to be burned at anti-Israel rallies.

Now that's chutzpah.

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