In Defence of Suicide Bombers
Uploaded by Muslim 4 Life on May 03, 2002
"Another suicide bombing has taken place in Israel," said the TV announcer. "But this isn't just any suicide bomber. This time it is a young girl." What? A girl in her teens, yet to blossom and venture into life, has put her soul at the mercy of God. (Aiat Al-Khras blew herself up to try to calm her anger and frustration and to lessen her own pain and that of her people by killing some Israeli soldiers and civilians.)
A girl? It boggles my mind that a girl my age has sacrificed her life. A girl - no offense at my going on and on that this was a girl - of course I'm into girl power and all that. But what would make her give up her life so definitely?
What were her motives? Were they hatred? Were they humiliation? Or did they spring from the need to prove a point? Is it a religious upbringing with promises of paradise in reward for acts of martyrdom? Is it the parental support she received for her convictions? Is it brainwashing, or rather encouragement from a Palestinian society with no other means of fighting back against oppression and humiliation from Israelis?
On April 6, 1994, 40 days after a Jewish terrorist shot dead 29 Palestinians praying in Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque during the holy month of Ramadan, the first Palestinian suicide bomber struck in the Israeli town of Afula, killing nine.
Unlike the Japanese kamikaze, Palestinian suicide bombers are neither products of a passive and unquestioning obedience to political authority nor pressed into service against their will. Religious or ideological fervor appears to offer only a partial explanation. And from what is known about their personal backgrounds they are also not social misfits or clinical psychopaths.
Without exception, the suicide bombers have lived their lives on the receiving end of a system designed to trample their rights and crush every hope of a brighter future.
In the eyes of many Palestinians and others the Israeli occupation is virtually indistinguishable from South African apartheid. Confronted by a seemingly endless combination of death, destruction, restriction, harassment and humiliation, they conclude that ending life as a bomb - rather than having it ended by a bullet - endows them, even if only in their final moments, with a feeling of purpose and control previously considered out of reach. The resort to suicide bombings also has a...