Murderous, barbaric -- and utterly futile (On suicide bombing)

National Post ^ | June 24 2002 | http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/story.html?id={BAEC0F45-CF46-448E-9F3C-B393BCBABF95}

[knighthawk]

At a recent seminar on Islam at the University of Toronto, a woman shrouded in black spoke with a Canadian accent through the most all-encompassing yashmak I have ever seen, the opening for her eyes as narrow as a mail slot. The fact that she looked like a visitor from an ancient desert kingdom gave extra emphasis to her cool acceptance of random Palestinian killing. She introduced her views with the correct academic reference. "I'm coming from a Chomskyan perspective here," she announced, peeking out. She meant Noam Chomsky, the professor who finds an excuse for any atrocity against Israel.

She defended the suicide bombers because, lacking planes and tanks, Palestinians apparently have no alternative. When asked how much good this has so far done them, she had no answer. That's understandable. The bombs have achieved nothing except misery and chaos. Even Edward Said, a tireless advocate of the Palestinians, recently condemned (in a Cairo paper, Al-Ahram) "the insanity of thinking that suicide bombing will lead directly to an Islamic Palestinian state."

The practical accomplishments of this technique, if any, remain in the future. It's tempting to imagine that the 100 or so Palestinians who have committed terror-suicide somehow understood this truth and therefore executed their crimes in a state of ecstasy, performing a dance of death that has somehow acquired social acceptance.

On Tuesday, Mohammed al-Ghoul, the 22-year-old Hamas killer, left a note that was more hymn of hate than vision of the future, though he bowed briefly to the idea of national freedom: "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."

In some circumstances that combination of monstrous crime and monstrous rhetoric would place a criminal beyond the range of human sympathy. But not now. Cherie Blair, the wife of the British Prime Minister, remarked the other day, "As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress." And Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, said: "When young people go to their deaths, we can all feel a degree of compassion for those youngsters."

The astounding truth is that in recent months articulate European opinion has depicted Palestinians as brave victims and Israelis as aggressors. Israel as a modern state was invented by Europeans and now faces the worst attack in its history. Still, its attempts to defend its rights have aroused enmity while Palestinian bombs have excited pity. How could this happen? On Monday, Hirsh Goodman wrote in the Jerusalem Report: "People ask, what is wrong with Israel's information efforts? Why is the country's image so bad? The real question is, I believe, somewhat different. Why should Israel have to explain that ... men and women blowing themselves up in kindergartens, buses, pizza parlors, is a bad thing? Shouldn't the information problem be a Palestinian thing?"

One statistic gets cited often: Those who have died from this conflict include far more Palestinians (about 1,460) than Israelis (about 530). Those numbers, always changing, appear often in print, to make the point that Israel's responses to the bombings have been excessive. But a study by the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) in Israel suggests that the numbers are misleading. As Don Radlauer of the ICT argues, the fatality totals deceptively lump "combatants in with non-combatants, suicide bombers with innocent civilians, and Palestinian 'collaborators' murdered by their compatriots as if they had been killed by Israel."

The ICT has divided the fatalities into categories, with revealing results. Of the Palestinian dead, 55% were combatants, actively taking part in military or terrorist action; whereas 25% of the Israelis were combatants. Of the Palestinian non-combatant dead, 7% were women; 37% of the Israeli non-combatant dead were women. The figures indicate that Palestinians are making war on civilians (while also killing some soldiers) and the Israelis are making war on soldiers (while also killing some civilians). Nothing in the data bears out the claim that Israel targets civilians. Perhaps eventually the world will understand this, as we now understand that the Jenin "massacre" was fiction.

The suicide bombers have no idea how their crimes will affect the Palestinian future. Can profound evil create a good society? Dostoyevsky had Ivan and Alyosha agree on this point in The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan says "What have children to do with it? Why should they suffer for the future? Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature." He asks whether Alyosha would do it. "No, I wouldn't," Alyosha says. The reason, Ivan says, is that those for whom the society is being built could not remain happy in the knowledge that their own lives were built on a child's unknowing sacrifice.

That idea has yet to take root among the Palestinians. A poll by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah reported last week that, against all the evidence, 67% of Palestinians claim to believe violence helps their cause.

[knighthawk]

Ping

[facedown]

Even Edward Said, a tireless advocate of the Palestinians, recently condemned (in a Cairo paper, Al-Ahram) "the insanity of thinking that suicide bombing will lead directly to an Islamic Palestinian state."

Now that's truly stunning. Said, ordinarily, is out there like pluto.

[Nix 2]

67% of Palestinians claim to believe violence helps their cause.

Ask them that same question a week from today. Especially since the only cause they ever had was one that Arafat articulated backed by the monster that the UN turned into.
They didn't gain Jordan. They didn't gain Lebanon. They will not gain a place that never existed.
All they have gained is a legacy of hate, murder, futility and brutality.

[knighthawk]

And that's why the Arabs support them: they want some one to do their dirty work.

[Steve Eisenberg]

A poll by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah reported last week that, against all the evidence, 67% of Palestinians claim to believe violence helps their cause.

First of all, what is their cause? If their cause is a Palestinian State alongside Israel, of course the violence hurts that cause. But that is NOT their cause. Their cause is to PREVENT establishment of such a compromise Palestinian state, and instead hold out for an all Muslim Middle East, even if it should take centuries. Remember they frequently equate Israel with the Crusader Kingdom, which lasted for two centuries.

In the short term, they will be successful if their example of faithfulness to the Islamofascist cause prevents George Bush from getting the kind of elected Palestinian government he asked for this afternoon. I think that in this the extremists will be successful. As for the long term, I think that they will fail, but that will not be known for centuries.

The suicide bombers, and those who send them, may be wrong and evil. I believe they are. But idiots fighting for a hopeless cause they are not.

[Ronin]

That's exactly the impression that I get. The whole Palistinian movement is an artifact of Arab oil money.

Rich shieks who have never had worse than a stubbed toe are playing Jihad with the world, feeling sanctimonius and self-righteous, they pay out their petro-dollars to have the grubby little Pallies do up against Isreali tanks and blow up pizza parlors. Never dreaming to take a risk personally.

This is the real reason why the Saudis refuse to cooperate with the Western intelligence services. Too many of those shieks have their fingerprints all over the terror -- and are absolutely terrified of what may happen if the world ever finds out what they have been doing.

Cut off the oil money and Mid-East terrorism would vanish in short order.

[ArcLight]

Actually, Edward Said is out there like Uranus.

[bribriagain]

I am saddened when I see posts by well intentioned folks miss the real point:

Jews are grub staking on Arab lands. When they get out, fewer people will die needless deaths.

[Nateman]

I think Moslem Arabs are grubs on civilized lands. There will be peace when we have removed them from the face of the earth.

[caspera]

Yeah. The Jews are interlopers on a land that the Romans called Judea, i.e. land of the Jews.

[facedown]

Actually, Edward Said is out there like Uranus.

10-4, but if we really want to extend the anaolgy, Ed Said is out there like alpha centauri!

[Steve Eisenberg]

I am saddened when I see posts by well intentioned folks miss the real point:

Jews are grub staking on Arab lands. When they get out, fewer people will die needless deaths.

According to the terrorists, every inch of the Middle East consists of Arab lands. This is why most terror attacks are inside the pre-1967 borders. This is why Arafat, and plenty of others, were just as interested in terror before 1967. This is why perhaps a third of Israeli Jews are descended from Jewish immigrants who came to Israel from other parts of the Middle East where Jews are no longer allowed to live.

2002 is shaping up as a particularly bad year for terror against Jewish Israelis. But proportionate to Jewish population at the time, terror deaths this year in Israel are unlikely to match those of such past years as 1947, or 1936, or 1834. To the terrorists, every inch of Palestine in which Jews live is a grub stake, whether a farming village in the Gallilee which has been Jewish since ancient times, or a West Bank "settlement" where Jews lived for centuries except between the 1940's and 1960's. As a military fact, Israel may not be able to hold onto West Bank settlements. However, such evident Israeli weaknesses are hardly the cause of the conflict.