Food for thought:

OpinionJournal - Featured Article: Semantics of Murder

Many in the West assume that the Muslim world has already answered by honoring the human bombs as "martyrs." And the chorus of voices from the Muslim world does support that assumption. Foreign ministers from 57 Muslim countries met in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, this month with the stated intention of defining terrorism and distancing Islam from terror. Instead, they ended up endorsing the suicide bombers.

Iran's former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, says he would accept the suicide of even 10% of Muslims in a nuclear war to wipe Israel off the map. Algeria's president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, has described the bombers as "innocent blossoms of martyrdom." Ghazi Algosaibi, Saudi Arabia's ambassador in London and also a poet, has praised the human bombs as a model for Muslim youth in an ode. Ismail Abushanab, the Hamas leader in Gaza, says that 10,000 Palestinians should die while killing 100,000 Israelis as part of a strategy to "put the Jews on the run." And Saddam Hussein says the suicide bombers are "reviving Islam."

If this is a revival, God have mercy on us all. Amir Taheri, the author, finishes on this note:

Islam forbids human sacrifice. The greatest Islamic festival is the Eid al-Adha which marks the day God refused Abraham's offer to sacrifice his firstborn and, instead, substituted a lamb. A god who refuses human sacrifice for his cause can hardly sanction the same to promote the strategies of Mr. Abushanab, or Yasser Arafat. Islam also rejects the crucifixion of Christ because it cannot accept that God would claim human sacrifice in atonement of men's sins.

Some, like Iran's President Mohammad Khatami, present suicide bombings as acts of individual desperation. This is disingenuous. One of the girls who blew herself up, murdering almost a dozen Israelis, had been recruited at 14 and brainwashed for two years. Mounting a suicide operation needs planning, logistics, surveillance, equipment, money and postoperation publicity--in short, an organization.

But then, the recruiters never use their own children. No one related by blood to the leaders of Hamas or Islamic Jihad has died in suicide bombings.

Arafat's wife, Suha, says she would offer her son for suicide attacks. Mrs. Arafat, however, has no son, only a daughter, living with her in Paris. It is always someone else's child who must die.

True, true.