The dramatic scene (March 25) of the Palestinian teenager caught at an IDF checkpoint with an explosive belt wrapped around his body has created great media interest in the question: How can Palestinians allow children to become perpetrators of suicide terror?
As HonestReporting illustrated in our March 2 communique, media reports regularly refuse to acknowledge the regular Palestinian incitement to hate and suicide bombing that lies at the heart of this problem. Instead, Israel is blamed for even this most obscene child abuse.
Yesterday’s USA Today article on this topic is another example of this. The thesis of the article is that ‘the sense that some Arab mothers hate Jews more than they love their children’ is simply wrong. The reporter interviews three pro-Palestinian ‘experts’ to reach this conclusion:
Experts discount claims that any Palestinian mother would wish her child to die as a martyr, even though the mothers of suicide bombers commonly are quoted as glorying in their child’s death. Such comments are meant to provide a show of strength and assuage political and community pressure, mental health experts say.
In other words, when Palestinian mothers, such as Umm Nidal who ‘always longed to be a mother of a shahid’, say they are fiercely proud of their dead terrorist sons, they are not to be taken seriously — it’s only a psychological phenomenon meant to ‘assuage community pressure.’
USA Today also passes off the full horror of jihadi suicide bombing against innocent civilians as a religious dilemma:
Religious mothers have a particular conflict in child rearing; in Islam, life on Earth is considered a test for getting into heaven. Dying as a martyr ensures immediate ascent there. [A psychologist] recounts an incident last week involving a devout mother suffering immense guilt because her son kept telling her he wanted to die as a martyr. ” ‘I don’t want him to die,’ ” Sarraj says the mother told him. ” ‘But at the same time, I’m a good Muslim.'”
The fact that the Palestinian brand of Islam requires her to make a choice between keeping her son (bad Muslim) and watching him blow up on an Israel commuter bus (good Muslim) is somehow avoided here. Responsible reporting would never show such utter lack of moral context.
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