Forced Female Suicide

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=11855 ^ | January 22, 2004 | Phyllis Chesler

[Maria S]

Are Palestinian female suicide bombers active members of a Death Cult, or unwilling participants in it? Are they religious fanatics, Western-style revolutionaries, or clinically depressed human beings facing No Exit lives? Have they been indoctrinated and brainwashed by master seducers or have they been brutally forced into it?

These are necessary questions to ask when contemplating the emergence of a new female form of suicide bomber. Certainly, some female Palestinian suicide bombers have "freely" chosen the murderous martyr's path: most likely, such women have had close male relatives who have died in the war that the Palestinians have declared against the Israelis.

But evidence also suggests that the Palestinians have created yet another form of Arab honor killing. For some time now, reports have reached my desk about Palestinian girls and women being recruited, seduced, and trapped, by older male terrorists in very woman-specific ways.

For example, I have been told that in one instance, the chosen Palestinian girl was unmarried and pregnant. She was offered the chance to "cleanse" her honor by blowing herself and Jews up. Her family spirited her out of the West Bank to safety in Europe. I have also been told that some Palestinian masters of mass murder have themselves had affairs with vulnerable young Palestinian girls in order to compromise their "honor" and to season them, pimp-style, for martyrdom. Hard facts are hard to come by, anecdotes abound.

Journalist Barbara Victor, the author of the recent book about Palestinian female suicide bombers, Army of Roses, and playwright Glyn O'Malley, whose play, Paradise, is on the same subject, have both dealt with some of the earliest Palestinian female suicide bombers whose lives were stunted by oppression.

Wafa Idris, the first Palestinian suicide bomber, was probably in a clinical depression. Her first and only child had been a stillborn and, as a result, she was now sterile. Her husband, who was also her first cousin, had divorced her over this and had already taken a second wife. She was mocked by family and friends and she understood that she had no future in Palestinian society. As a divorced and infertile woman, she was doubly "tainted." Her bleak prospects--due to Islamic and Palestinian misogyny and not to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--were used to trap her into redeeming her dishonor by becoming a murdering martyr.

We cannot say that these women (or, for that matter, their male counterparts) are making "free" choices. No one is offering them the presidency of their country, an all-paid scholarship to a prestigious university--or, as a third choice, the opportunity to kill and die at a tender age. Their choices are "forced." They are probably not political extremists or revolutionaries in the Western sense. They have grown up in a tribal, Islamic society in which women are expected to sacrifice themselves in terrible and medieval ways.

Most recently, the case of Reem al-Riyashi suggests a similar and horrifying scenario. Several Israeli sources have discovered that this young mother of two very young children "was forced to carry out the suicide attack as punishment for cheating on her husband." Allegedly, al-Riyashi's husband was a Hamas activist and her lover was a Hamas operative who had carried out the love affair with the express purpose of recruiting her. According to the British Sunday Times, al-Riyashi's husband himself drove her to the border crossing.

This is unbelievable--and tragic. Had these men threatened to kill her children if she refused this mission? I would not be surprised.

Whatever the tragic circumstances, it is important to understand that the coercion of women by men to become suicide bombers is not an aberration in the Middle East. Myth aside, Islam is the largest and most savage practitioner of religious and gender apartheid on the planet. If you attend a college in the Western world, you'd have no way of knowing this--perhaps this is because many Western multi-cultural ideologues have muted their criticism of Islamic misogyny in order to propagandize for the victory of the Palestinians over the Zionists.

Traditionally, gender apartheid under Islam includes female genital mutilation, compulsory veiling, arranged marriage, sequestration, polygamy, stonings for alleged adultery, approved wife-beating, and Arab honor killings in which raped girls and women are killed by their father or brother for the crime of "dishonor" they have brought upon their family.

It is this context that compels us to stop romanticizing these homicide bombers--and presenting them as heroes.

I understand what the Israeli ambassador to Sweden felt when he saw the exhibit that glorified yet another Palestinian female suicide bomber: Hanadi Jaradat, who killed 22 innocent Israeli civilians, both Christian Arabs and Jews. Jaradat's smiling, serene face floated above a pool of civilian blood. The artwork had been done by an expatriate Israeli artist and installed at the entrance to a building that is to house an upcoming conference against genocide. The Swedes had promised the Israelis that the Middle East conflict was not going to be part of the conference.

But this art exhibit found a way to bring the Middle East conflict into the conference--in a way that justified and glorified homicidal/genocidal suicide bombers who, upon closer inspection, may be committing a "forced" suicide as their only way out.

[Triple Word Score]

Phooey. A murderer is a murderer. Let us not seek excuses for them--let's root them out and stop them before they do what they do, punish those who help them, and expel their families from the privileges of living in Western civilization.

[I still care]

I think the point the author is making is that these women are not willing to do this, they are being threatened. If they do what they are told, they won't, perhaps, be set on fire in the kitchen or stabbed and strangled in their beds by their own families.

[Triple Word Score]

It isn't that I don't get what you're saying--I do--but cooperating with evil is pretty much the same as being evil. Nobody could make me do this thing--even for a cause I believe in.

[gridlock]

Nobody could make me do this thing--even for a cause I believe in.

What if you were a mother and they threatened to kill your kids?

I know, you still have to make the choice for the lesser evil, but it is a terrible position to be in. It is revealing that the Islamabombers are using the well established mechanisms of Islamic gender oppression to recruit these female bombers.

Furthermore, it is important that this fact become well known in the West. As it stands now, the female bombers are a great propaganda boon for the Palestinians because Westerners try to understand how Israeli oppression could drive a woman to such an act. The answer lies in the fact that it is not Israeli oppression that drives the woman. It is just the Islamabombers sacrificing their chattel class women, an asset of little value to them...

[20yearvet]

"Had these men threatened to kill her children if she refused this mission?"

they are probably recruiting those children to also be bombers.

[Triple Word Score]

I think Todd Beamer and those who fought with him proved to the world that even if you are going to die for it, you fight back against evil.

You can't win with those kind of people--but at worst, you can make sure you don't die alone.

[Triple Word Score]

I phrased that badly--you make sure that you don't take out innocents if it's at all possible--but you take out the ones who have backed you into an impossible corner, for sure.

[gridlock]

You'll get no argument from me on that one.