No Straw MenEnlightened discourse proscribes arguments that are weak or imaginary, like straw, set up only to be confuted summarily.

Is There No Shame?

A version of this blog post appeared on Dollars and Crosses (March 25, 2004), on Israel Is Moral (March 25, 2004), and in the Hamilton College Spectator (April 2, 2004).

It was enough that when Yasir Arafat promised his people gender equality, he meant that the fairer sex should take part in suicide bombing. Now, 13 months later, we learn that the Palestinians are manipulating 11-and 14-year-olds into that same twisted fate—to blow themselves up.

If having children only so they can strap shrapnel and TNT to their chests, to massacre as many Israelis as possible, does not make the world condemn the Palestinians as as a whole, what must one do today to warrant condemnation? Is there no shame? No self-worth? No love for one’s family and friends that trumps one’s hatred for one’s enemies?

Thomas Friedman, the foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, answered as follows a year ago. “The world must understand that the Palestinians have not chosen suicide bombing out of ‘desperation’ stemming from the Israeli occupation. That is a huge lie.” The Palestinians “actually want to win their independence in blood and fire. All they can agree on as a community is what they want to destroy, not what they want to build. Have you ever heard Mr. Arafat talk about what sort of education system or economy he would prefer, what sort of constitution he wants?”

To be sure, there are individual Palestinians who condemn suicide bombing. But since the Palestinian Authority is a dictatorship, those courageous individuals are usually the régime’s first victims (“political prisoners”), and are drowned out by leaders who glorify such “jihad” and “martyrdom” as a religious duty. If the Palestinians as a people truly condemn suicide bombing, why does it continue? Tom Friedman again explains. People tolerate terrorism, and terrorism is successful, because terrorists “are almost always acting on the basis of widely shared feelings or yearnings. As Israeli political scientist Ehud Sprinzak rightly put it, these so-called extremists are usually just the tip of an iceberg that is connected in a deep and fundamental way to the bases of their respective societies.”

Unpublished Notes

Then, in March, we learned that they were using 11- and 14-year-olds as suicide bombers. Now, a New York Times two-part series informs us that Rukon, a 10-year-old, “[a]sked if he thought he could be friends with an Israeli boy his age,” “drew a hand across his throat. ‘I want only to stab him,’ he said. Mr. Nashrati [Rukon’s father] hastily said Rukon was young and ignorant. ‘This son is old enough to understand,’ he said, indicating Munir, 20. Asked if he could be friends with an Israeli his age, Munir Nashrati said, ‘It’s impossible.’”

In 2002, Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey reported similar refrains:

“They want to be martyrs even if they don’t know the meaning of the word,” says Muhammad Abu Rukbah, principal of an elementary school in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp. “They see the images on TV, the posters in the streets, the honor of the martyrs’ families, and they want that kind of honor for themselves, for their families.” Out on the dusty street of the camp, 10-year-old Aya, a pretty, bright-eyed girl in a school smock, is asked how she feels about kids just like her who are blown up by murderer-martyrs in Israel. “I don’t feel sorry for them,” she says. “Their families and their mothers are pushing them to fight us and kill us.” She adds that she’d like to be a doctor someday, “or maybe a martyr myself”. . . .

The despair that afflicts—and motivates—so much of Palestinian society is not enough to launch a concerted campaign of suicide bombings. For that, cynical technicians are required who build an infrastructure to encourage, discipline and arm the would-be shahid, or martyr. Those same technicians have worked to create a mystique around the dead, which attracts still more recruits. And all this takes money, so contributions have had to be collected from sympathizers around the world.

In Gaza and the West Bank, Islamic fundamentalists from Hamas and other groups have nurtured a cult of death for years, having learned from the example of Lebanon’s Hizbullah. . . . Teachers in Hamas day camps and preachers in mosques have kept up a constant chorus of praise for “martyrs” defending Palestinian lands. Like Hizbullah, they called for an end to the Jewish state.