A Photo Essay by
Maya Alleruzzo
Posted on 06/11/2002 3:18:21 PM PDT by Registered
A Martyr's Birthplace
A Photo Essay by
Maya Alleruzzo
|
Om Mohammed helps her twelve-year-old son Abu Ali with a toy suicide bomber belt he fashioned on his own. "I hope to be a Martyr...I hope when I get 14 or 15 to explode myself." His mother is proud of her son: "God gave him to me to protect and defend our homeland." The family is seen in their Gaza City home, May 15, 2002. ( Maya Alleruzzo / The Washington Times ) |
| GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip May 15, 2002 -- Abu Ali, like many 12-year-olds living in Gaza, has dreams of eternity. But the Palestinian boy's hopes are rooted in a grim reality: "I hope to be a martyr," he said. "I hope when I get to 14 or 15 to explode myself." His mother, Om Muhammed, is eager to help her son, one of six children, accomplish his goal. She helps him tug on a toy suicide bomber costume in her living room as she serves mint tea to a visitor. The get-up is dauntingly convincing, but is harmlessly made of electrical tape, plywood and spare wire. Harmless for now, at least. "I encourage him, and he should do this," said the woman, the mother of six. "God gave him to me to defend our land. Palestinian women must have more and more children till we liberate our land. This is a holy duty for all Palestinian people." Little Ali, masked in a kaffiyeh and carrying a toy gun made of pipes, marched earlier today in a demostration marking Al Nakba or " the catastrophe," as Palestinians refer to the day Israel was founded in 1948. Given Abu Ali's start in life, his future might seem inevitable. Walking through the streets of Gaza City, one can see young boys playing with toy Kalashnikovs and slingshots beneath the walls painted with graffiti depicting masked Hamas fighters, grenades, exploding buses. Jobs in nearby Tel Aviv dried up for Palestinians from Gaza after the latest intifada began once peace talks broke down in 2000. The Israelis closed the border crossings in an attempt to stop the Palestinian suicide bombers from blowing up themselves and Israeli civilians on buses, in cafes, supermarkets and restaurants. But the bombers still make it through from other places. The killing and maiming of mostly innocent Israelis by these young Palestinians has only made life harder for the rest of the Palestinian people. Even for Gazans with local jobs, road closings often leave them sleeping at the Israeli checkpoints. Students from the south now sleep in tents at Al Aqsa University, lest they risk missing classes when the roads close. With no passports, Palestinians cannot travel. If jobs here are scarce, there is one man who is making enough to support his family. Twenty-four-year-old Bahaa Yassin paints most of the portraits of martyrs seen in the Gaza Strip. Before the intifada, he did a variety of artwork to support himself and his wife. Family portraits, shop signs, and the occasional martyr. Now, about 70 percent of his business comes from these large, loving tributes to the young fighters. Funeral marches are a citywide event. Young boys march -- usually five kilometers from the hospital to the graveyard -- alongside men shooting live rounds into the air. Hisham Zaqout, whose nephew Youssef, 15, was killed when he tried to infiltrate an Israeli settlement, say the well-wishers, posters and artistic tributes have helped ease the family's pain. "In Islam, sacrifice is the highest honor, " he says. "Youssef did this for all of us to be free." The irony of his words is that the continued bombings and Israeli responses to them only continues the cycle of violence and hopelessness that has led to a downward spiral in the lives of both the Israelis and Palestinians. Maya Alleruzzo is a staff photojournalist at The Washington Times in Washington, D.C. She can be contacted at malleruzzo@WashingtonTimes.com |
,,, their "god" doesn't exist.
If this isn't an argument for birth control, I don't know what is.
Perhaps we can help....
'tho when I was in Catholic grammer school I had a friend, who after reading The Lives of the Saints, wanted to become a martyr when she grew up.
I wish Israel would end this madness by using 10 kiloton neutron bombs (bombs designed to kill people, and leave little residual, long-term radiation) over these refugee camps, they would be doing the world a favor, and make me feel much better.
When you discover coral snakes under your house, you have to rip up the boards, go under the house and kill each and every one of the dangerous little bastards, else one day, the little coral snakes will kill your pets, children, spouse, you, or all of the above.
PULL!!!
I'm lousy with PhotoShop, otherwise, I'd put someone with a shotgun in there...
Free to do what? Free to be what? Free to be Arafat's obedient little peons in an Islamofascist theocracy, free to be cannon fodder in the next stage of the war against the West, that's what. They're still breathing but their lives are already over. These people have no chance of building a country of their own because all they know how to do is destroy. They could be completely justified in their grievance against Isreal and they would still be doomed, doomed by their own bloodlust.
And Arab blood money sure helps, skiffy witch. She's every bit as bad as the crackhead/heroin junkie mothers that put their daughters out on the street to prostitute themselves to support mommy's drug habit after she gets too strung out to be desirable.
Unless you mean the Muslims, it is not at all clear to me that this is the case. The West has been too brainwashed into "limited war" that spares "civilians". Look at our last really unequivocal victory - WWII. Our enemies' cities were in ruins, their people killed in large numbers, those still alive prostrate before us, their evil ideologies erased. We ran those countries with a velvet-gloved iron fist until they were ready to join the civilized Western world.
Do we have the will to do it again?
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