Posted on 06/23/2002 10:15:32 AM PDT by TennTuxedo
Unlike Victims, Bombers Died Without Pain
By Rosie DiManno
"How beautiful it is to make my bomb shrapnel kill the enemy. How beautiful it is to kill and to be killed ? not to love death, but to struggle for life, to kill and be killed for the lives of the coming generation."
T WENTY-TWO-YEAR- OLD Mohammed al-Ghoul, a master's student in Islamic studies, wrote those lines. Then he went out and blew up a crowded bus in Jerusalem.
Twenty dead, including the homicide bomber. At least 55 wounded. The most deadly terrorist attack in the Holy City in six years.
It was not a thing of beauty.
This is what happens when a conventional bomb ? garden-variety, garage-made ? is exploded in a contained space, such as a city bus:
The explosive material packed around the device, Semtex or dynamite, say, releases an eruption of energy that heats up the contents of the bomb ? in this case, a quiver of nails. In the blink of an explosive flash, the nails are pushed outward on a pressure wave that cannot be contained within the puny confines of a steel bus. Think of water boiling in a lidded pot. The lid will not hold.
This super-hot air will melt and warp everything in the immediate vicinity. It will turn the metal framework of a bus into instant shrapnel, over and above the shrapnel (the nails) fitted into the bomb itself. Now the bus becomes a killing instrument of metal and glass and fire.
The force of the blast is determined by the quantity of the explosive. An average bomb ? the kind strapped around a suicide terrorist's waist, covered by a shirt ? would likely detonate at a rate of about 28,000 feet per second ? or about 22 times faster than a 9 mm bullet leaving the muzzle of a handgun. That means that the surrounding air pressure ? normally 15 pounds per square inch ? would spike to 2,200 pounds per square inch. Such heat and pressure will melt iron.
A person sitting nearby would feel, momentarily, a shock wave slamming into his or her body, with an "overpressure" of 300,000 pounds. Such a blast would crush the chest, rupture liver, spleen, heart and lungs, melt eyes, pull organs away from surrounding tissue, separate hands from arms and feet from legs. Bodies would fly through the air or be impaled on the jagged edges of crumpled metal and broken glass.
"For the exposed part of the body, the side facing the blast, it would be like falling off a building," says Dr. Pekka Sinervo, a physics professor at the University of Toronto. "No, actually it would be worse."
"Think of a hurricane," adds Constable Ken Evans, a bomb squad specialist with Toronto police. "All that wind moving at, what, 100 miles an hour? Air pushed by a bomb blast could be going at 25,000 feet a second. If you're standing close, it will blow your organs off the bone structure."
If you're the suicide bomber, if you're Mohammed al-Ghoul, you would feel... nothing.
"Vaporized," says Evans.
Except for knowing that you were about to die ? unlike your victims, the children on their way to school, the secretaries on the way to the office, the shoppers who rely on public transport ? I fail to see the courage required in such an act of destruction. It is a coward's death.
Suicide bombers, homicide bombers, they are the instruments of cowardly terrorist organizations, proxy murderers who pick off Jewish children and women, young mothers, old grandparents, teenagers at a pizzeria, twenty-somethings at a disco, entire families sitting down to a Passover dinner at a banquet hall, shoppers squeezing melons at an outdoor market, bus riders: shredded Israelis.
Hamas, an extremist Islamic group, took "credit" for yesterday's bombing. U.S. President George W. Bush was quick to condemn to the attack, as will most Western leaders, perhaps even our own foreign affairs minister, Bill Graham, with his palpably pro-Palestinian sentiments.
But Bush, Graham, all those Western leaders, including European presidents and prime ministers keen to appease their own Muslim constituencies, don't have to live in Israel, where buses kill. They don't have to send their children to schools patrolled by soldiers. They needn't worry that a beloved teenage daughter, out for the evening with friends, will have her minced remains scraped off the sidewalk by volunteer crews that immediately descend on every explosion site, scouring for body bits ? because this is not debris, not effluent. These are the precious remains of human beings, and all their families might get to bury.
This is the beautiful spectre imagined by al-Ghoul? An educated Palestinian, resident of the Al Faraa refugee camp, a devout Muslim, a man of the Koran, blinded by the zealotry of Hamas, which had recruited him as one more human bomb. They won't do the killing on their own, the Hamas leadership. Why sacrifice themselves when there is so much human fodder at their disposal, all those hate-poisoned martyrs, little more than boys and girls, impoverished more inside their souls than in the outward manifestation of their lives.
Al-Ghoul ? how appropriate, that name! ? had twice before failed to stage suicide attacks, according to the note he left behind, although he didn't explain how or why he had been previously thwarted. Had he been repulsed by security, by the Israeli military, by checkpoints? Or had he lost his nerve?
If only more of them would lose their nerve.
"This time, I hope I will be able to do it," he'd written in his farewell missive, this after paying one last weekend visit to relatives, including thee sisters to whom he'd brought sweets. When he took his leave, the sisters assumed their brother was returning to An-Najah University in nearby Nablus, where he was preparing for exams. But why bother to study, why embark on a new life when you can choose death instead, for yourself, for umpteen strangers.
What can Israel do now? Retaliate, no doubt. And vengeance is theirs. Continue building their 360-kilometre security fence to wall off Palestinians on the West Bank from Israel proper. Support, as a besieged nation, even more punitive actions against the Palestinian enclaves on the West Bank, even more humiliating rules that circumscribe normal movement.
Yes, to all that, if with heavy heart. Because to do otherwise, to placate the devastators, would be to reward Hamas and their kin.
These are not, I have come to believe in recent months, people who deserve a state.
Their independent Palestine would be a rogue nation, a failed state from infancy, a grotesquery from inception. I did not used to think this. The homicide bombers, and the families who celebrate them as martyrs beloved by God, have convinced me of it.
It was Kamel Irikat, an inspector in the Palestine police force and first generation Mufti terrorist, to whom history gives the dubious distinction of being the first Arab who vowed to "throw the Jews into the sea," this after the United Nations voted in favour of partitioning Palestine in 1947.
If not throwing them into the sea, then shrapnel-bombing them, one by one.
We have to stop the Islamikaze attacks before they kill more people in Israel and spread to other parts of the world. We know how to stop the Islamikaze bombers. The question is "Do we have the "guts"?"
"The IDF captured the family of Islamikaze Mohammed al-Ghoul. The entire Patestinian camp section was ordered to the street as witnesses. A three Judge panel convicted the family of being related to the Islimikaze bomber, and the family was sentenced to Death. An IDF bulldozer ran over the families home, and a flame thrower crew finished off what remained. The entire family was tied to crucifiction polls and blind-folded. They were asked if they had any last words to any other family in the area who might conceal an Islamikaze Terrorist. The family rebuked Hamas, rebuked Arafat, rebuked their son, and rebuked America and the zionist occupation forces for their inhumanity. They were then summarily shot dead by a squad of representatives from the families of the victims of the Islamifacist violence. Their bodies were guarded for 72 hours - hung in the sun, and lubricated by pork fat to keep them moist. They were then buried in the local zoo, under the cage of Monkey's - so that they would feel at home with their kindred. A compass was added into the Monkey cage - 45 degrees out of kilter so that any muslim who thought to neal and pray would do so in the wrong direction."
an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.....
Hmmm. I thought there was a New Testament that kinda revised that idea. Oh, well.
I challenge anybody to make up a better name for this guy.
The only way that the worls wil lbe rid of this disease, this insanity, is to use the nuclear sword to cast these monsters back into the mideval hell from which they came. The worls has experienced over a thousand years of their hate, their cultural and literal genocide, their contempt for everything upon which our civilization is based.
Every Arab capitol should simultaeously vanish in a bath of nuclear fire. Each and every one of them. No negotiation, no parley, no compromise. And no remorse.
This article says nothing about why the "United States" is "Next"...it is only your personal fantasy.
I have no doubt that the terrorists have such in mind.
Please do not alter titles or articles to satisfy your fixations.
--Boris
Yes, there is, but keep in mind, not all believe in the OT or quote from it, just the OT .
"homicide" bomber is nothing more than some White House dolt changing a word "suicide" that is actually is a insult to the Muslim Religion. Use the apporpiate word " Suicide Bomber". The American public knows that a Suicide bomber is a murderer. This game with word playing is a joke. Call a spade a spade.
ITEM: There is no moral equivalance in this equation. Neither the West nor the Jews seeks the subjugation of the world to its belief system and the destruction of those who do not agree with them. Islamic culture actively seeks to destroy all that does not lie within its bounds.
ITEM: Islamic culture destroys entire cultures, regardless of nationality. This is the indesputable record of history.
ITEM: Among the many failures of those who espouse Christian beliefs is the notion that, if we all just held hands and prayed hard enough, everything would be just OK. It won't work for those whose relatives are deep in the grips of drug addiction, much less against a threat to our entire civiliaztion. 'Kumbaya Christianity' represents an abrogation of our fundamental responsiblity to stand up to evil.
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