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A mother’s blessing to kill

GAZA CITY, June 25 -- Mariam Farahat interrupted the somber greetings offered by a visitor. "I don’t want condolences, I want congratulations," she said. "I encouraged my son to sacrifice himself. It is a victory."

She was speaking of her firstborn, Mohammed, 19, who was killed in March during a one-man raid on an Israeli settlement in the southern Gaza Strip. Armed with an assault rifle and grenades, Mohammed killed five students at a military school for religious Jews and wounded 23 other settlers at Gush Katif before he was gunned down.

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Farahat said Mohammed informed her beforehand that he was preparing an attack on a settlement. He disappeared for a while, but on the eve of the assault, he came to the house for lunch. Farahat fixed him kebab and cucumber salad. Mohammed told her he had inspected and photographed his target, and was ready to act. He said he dreamed of Paradise, where virgins are promised the martyr, she recalled.

"I said, 'Don't think twice. Achieve your goals.' ..."

There is no reason here, no logic. No morals, no ethics, no sense of right and wrong. It's all just, "Let's kill the bastards!" and if you die, you become much loved and revered. Hey, you even get to rape virgin slaves in the afterlife. What could be better?

I feel that David Brooks says it best in his Atlantic commentary, The Culture of Martyrdom:

Suicide bombing is the crack cocaine of warfare. It doesn't just inflict death and terror on its victims; it intoxicates the people who sponsor it. It unleashes the deepest and most addictive human passions--the thirst for vengeance, the desire for religious purity, the longing for earthly glory and eternal salvation. Suicide bombing isn't just a tactic in a larger war; it overwhelms the political goals it is meant to serve. It creates its own logic and transforms the culture of those who employ it. This is what has happened in the Arab-Israeli dispute.

The sad horror here is that someone thinks it's great to die for a cause as long as they take out a lot of their enemy. And here's a mother embracing that, and setting such a wonderful example for her children.