Sheik Ahmed Yassin said he yearned for martyrdom, and at the ripe age of 67 he found it.
It came much sooner for Kamal Abu Saud’s 16-year-old son Sabih, who blew himself up in a West Bank village with Israeli troops in pursuit last year.
The elder Saud did something then that was unexpected: He did not praise his son as a martyr to the Palestinian cause. “As a father, I am angry about what happened,” he told a New York Times reporter. Had he known of his son’s intentions to be a suicide bomber, he said, “I would have prevented him, if I could.”
Sabih, who had just turned 16 when he was sent on his suicide mission, was one of the youngest suicide bombers to date. Last month, Israeli police reported that an even younger set of suicide bombers–boys aged 13, 14 and 15, had been stopped. They were carrying homemade firearms as they tried to cross a checkpoint from the West Bank, purportedly to attack the Israeli city of Afula.
Earlier this month, suicide bombers aged 17 and 18 from the Gaza Strip detonated explosives packed with steel ball bearings in the industrial port of Ashdod, killing 10. Days later, troops at a West Bank checkpoint arrested a 12-year-old boy as he unknowingly tried to smuggle a bomb out of the West Bank city of Nablus. When he was caught, the terrorists who sent him apparently tried to detonate the device via remote control using a cellphone. They failed.
Drenched in messages of hate and violence, at school and home, another generation of Palestinian children is becoming fodder for the intifada, poisoning the future of Palestinian society and of peace efforts. Unfortunately, the Palestinian terrorists who prey on children have been all too successful in creating a culture that glorifies the violent suicide of the young. It’s no secret that teenagers and even preteens are particularly suggestible to this sort of manipulation. The terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad either brainwash these teens and preteens with tales of heavenly delights awaiting those who become “martryrs” to the cause, or coldly use them as the equivalent of human shields to foil Israeli security measures.
The Jerusalem Post reported that since the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, terrorists have dispatched 29 suicide bombers younger than 18. Forty other minors were arrested on suspicion of planning suicide bombings. And another 22 carried out so-called “sacrificial attacks” in which they opened fire and were killed.
The Palestinian message celebrating a violent death to kill innocent Israelis is inescapable. This is a society that celebrated a 21-year-old mother of two who blew herself up in January, killing three Israeli soldiers and a security guard in Gaza. This is a society where student candidates at the most prominent university “no longer stump on simply better library services and cheaper lunches,” the Tribune reported that same month. “They also campaign on which party claims to have killed more Israelis.” This is a society where “children trade martyr cards, purchased at their local shops instead of Pokemon or baseball cards,” according to the Post. “. . . One favorite wall slogan reads: `Beware of death by natural causes.’ “
To direct the young to sacrifice themselves is a disgrace. Some Palestinians, parents and professionals, have begun to speak out against the abuse of these children. But many more must do so to counteract the toxic influence of the terrorists. Palestinian leaders should be praising parents like Kamal Abu Saud, who aren’t afraid to label the sacrifice of their children as suicide bombers for what it is: an immense tragedy.
