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A column in the LA TIMES by Irshad Manji, author of “The Trouble With Islam: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith”, describes the warped pop culture of the Palestinians:
Palestinians Are Trapped by Their Own Culture
Tuesday’s simultaneous bus bombings in Israel, carried out at a time when the Sharon government insists on withdrawing from Gaza, raises a basic question: Why is peaceful coexistence taking so long in the Holy Land?
...Posters of shaheeds martyrs plaster the buildings of the West Bank and Gaza. Billboards proclaim their undying honor. Adolescents make up rap tunes to them while expressing hope that one day they will imitate the self-immolators. Even a soccer tournament on Palestinian Children’s Day is named for a suicide bomber.
I’m not implying that Israeli government policies are blameless. Far from it. For example, the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon refuses to arrest the criminals who set up illegal outposts in the West Bank. Such willful negligence will only feed extremism on both sides.
But let’s not lose sight of the larger reality. After the Aqaba peace summit in June 2003, both the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers encountered protests. Hard-line Israelis resorted to demonstrating and jeering. Hard-line Palestinians resorted to blowing up buses and the people in them. That’s a life-and-death difference in choices.
Manji shows that suicide bombers aren’t driven by economic hardship:
Many of my fellow liberals would argue that choices don’t exist for Palestinians they’re economically impoverished and desperate. Not according to Mohammed Hindi, the top Gaza leader of Islamic Jihad. His response was part of a longer interview I conducted with him in Gaza on camera and before the construction of Israel’s security barrier.
“What’s the difference,” I asked, “between ‘suicide’ and ‘martyrdom,’ as you folks now call it?”
“Suicide,” he replied, “is done out of despair. But most of our martyrs were very successful in their earthly lives.”
Hindi’s answer floored me. By his own admission, what drives so many of today’s suicide bombers isn’t that which the material world has failed to deliver to them, but something besides perhaps the Koran’s promises for the afterlife or, perhaps more precisely, Palestinian culture’s ideological exploitation of the Koran’s promise of paradise.
The Palestinians need leaders who want their children to live healthy and productive lives, not blow themselves up.
