Posted on 01/28/2006 5:21:24 PM PST by SJackson
She has encouraged three of her sons to die attacking Israel, and would be proud if the other three followed suit. She appeared in a video with her youngest boy, Mohammed, 17, telling him not to return alive from a suicide mission. Now she is a democratically elected Hamas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
On the electoral rolls, she is listed as Maryam Farahat. To Palestinians she is known as "the mother of the struggle".
To Israelis, however, she is the mother only of a deadly, terrorist brood - and a political travesty.
Her home in Gaza has become a shrine to her dead sons. In front of traditional "martyrdom" posters in which her dead children - one little more than a boy - tote high-powered rifles, she explains the "holy duty" of suicide missions.
"Encouraging my sons to be martyrs is serving Islam," she said through her fourth son, Wesam, 33, who says that, like his fellow "Mujahideen", he considers "martyrdom the way to liberation".
Now she has a different "duty", and one about which she admits she knows little: politics. After a shock win this week, she was hurriedly reading up on Hamas literature to ensure she does not break the party line.
"It is two parts of the same duty," she said. "Politics and martyrdom. My sons gave their lives for their people. Politics is my way to give."
The first of her "sacrifices" came in 2002, when she appeared in a video message with her son, Mohammed, before he launched a gun and grenade attack on an Israeli settlement in the Gaza strip. "I always longed to be the mother of a martyr," she said afterwards. At his side on the film, she instructed the boy not to come back alive. He didn't.
Neither did 18-year-old Ariel Zana, an Israeli who was attending a lecture in the settlement of Atzmona when Mohammed Farahat burst into the hall. In all, Mohammed killed five Israeli youths before he himself was brought down.
"I feel weak, I have lost most of my strength. I am bleeding," Avi Zana, Ariel's father, told the Sunday Telegraph. "The mother of the one who killed my son and that encouraged him to do so will be in parliament now. It doesn't make sense. It's so dangerous. This is a red line that has been crossed."
In Gaza, when the news filtered back to Maryam Farahat that Mohammed had followed her instructions, she received guests with coffee and sweets, bathing in what she described as a new-found "strength and honour".
For Hamas, that glowing reputation among Palestinians was too good not to exploit for last week's legislative poll. On the campaign trail she was a hot ticket at rallies, drawing thousands of attentive listeners as she described the "duty to liberate the [Palestinian] homeland".
Wesam is one of three surviving sons of Mrs Farahat. After Mohammed was killed in Atzmona, his brother, Nidal, was killed in an Israeli assassination. Known as a master engineer, he had refined the home-made Qassam mortars with which Hamas militants have peppered Israeli settlements and towns. In 2003, he was working on a new bomb-carrying drone when booby-trapped parts exploded, killing him and five others.
Mrs Farahat said she was "dignified and honoured" by his death, and took comfort from the Israeli fatalities he had helped inflict. After Nidal's death, Hamas continued to use his Qassam rockets.
Farwad Farahat was heading to a launch site in 2005 when his car was hit by an Israeli missile.
In the dust and sand of her Gaza home, all three of Mrs Farahat's dead sons are celebrated in print. But now her own election campaign posters cover the walls too.
Hamas' rise to power, and hers with it, has done little to dispel speculation that this week's poll will only worsen the cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Speaking calmly, in a soft voice, she has repeatedly said she would be delighted for "all my sons [to] be martyrs".
Like many Israelis, Avi Zana is not in a mood to tolerate more attacks. "Today, I am more hateful than I was," said Mr Zana. "We should have been tougher, we forget too fast here that thousands of Israelis have been killed. I used to forgive, but not today. Today I feel more in the mood for vengeance."
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