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A Culture of Suicide?
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Hassan Al-Hotary holding a picture of his son |
On
July 1st, 2001, shortly before midnight, Saed Hassan Al-Hotary mingled with Israeli teenagers queuing to
get into the Pascha nightclub in Tel Aviv. At 20:00 GMT, he exploded, killing 20 Israelis and injuring 150. Before blowing
himself up, 22-year-old Al-Hotary, member of the Ezzedine al-Qassam
Brigades of Hamas, made a vow in his last will and testament:
“Prisoners, wounded, martyrs, widows, in your names all, I
sacrifice my life for the sake of Allah, taking revenge for your
cries, weeping and woes. I will turn my body into shrapnel and
explosives that will chase Zionists and burn their remains.”
A wave of suicide bombings has swept Israel ever since Ariel Sharon and 1000 Israeli policemen stormed into
al-Aqsa mosque - particularly sacred to Muslims - on September 28, 2000.
Click
here to read an interview with a would-be suicide bomber.
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Suicide
operations haven’t been taking place in Israel alone, but also in Afghanistan,
Argentina, Croatia, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan, the Philippines,
Russia, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, the United States, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and most recently,
Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Spain and Turkey.
Each time a suicide bombing makes headlines, rage at Muslims grows
and more questions arise: Why are the vast majority of suicide
bombers Muslim? Why do young Muslim men and women kill themselves
and others in different parts of the world? What about the civilian
victims who die in these bombings? Why are the bombers considered by
some to be martyrs? What is Islam’s stance? Is Muslim culture one
of suicide?
“We
have been asking for help all along but the world is
deaf.” |
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Three
days after the famous Pascha nightclub bombing, Israeli families of
the victims gathered in the Yarkon cemetery in Tel Aviv as their
young were being buried. Among the dead was 16-year-old Anya
Kazachkov, whose mother found it hard to believe what had happened.
“You wanted so much to live in Israel, finish high school and join
the army. You don’t belong here. I want to take you home,” the
Telegraph reported the mother saying to her dead daughter.
While
Anya’s mother sobbed, the mother of another “victim” was also
grieving, mourning the death of her son, who was not actually an
Israeli victim, but the bomber himself. Not only do Saed
Al-Hotary’s family members consider their son to be a victim, but
they are even proud of what he did.
“The
Jews took our land away from its rightful owners and left the
Palestinians with nothing… How would anyone like it if another
person or group of people denied them their livelihood,” Saed’s
father, Hassan Al-Hotary, told American journalist Edna Yaghi.
“We
have been asking for help all along but the world is deaf to what we
say. The only way we can make an impact is to take steps to be
heard… We scream, we cry and we become martyrs, but no one hears
us because they don’t want to hear us.
“If
you want a strong person to hear you, then you have to be stronger
than that person. The only way the Palestinians can be stronger is
through suicide bombings. When martyrs blow themselves up, then the
Jews and Americans listen to us,” Al-Hotary said.
It
might be natural for Palestinian families of suicide bombers to
regard their sons/daughters as victims, but it is particularly
notable that an Israeli father (Rami Elhanan), who lost his
14-year-old daughter in a suicide bombing in 1997, shares their
view. “The boy whose mother was humiliated, in the morning,
at the checkpoint, will commit suicide in the evening,” Rami
Elhanan told Australian journalist John Pilger. “The suicide
bomber was a victim - the same as my girl was. Of that I am sure.”
“The
suicide bomber [who killed my daughter] was a victim - the
same as my girl was. Of that I am sure.”
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Regardless
of whether suicide bombers are to be perceived as victims or
terrorists, it is important to understand what motivates them; their
motives are significant in view of their being suicide bombers –
which means that they have to blow themselves up in order to
accomplish their operations. The mere fact that such an increasing
number of Muslim youth are willing to end their lives and the lives
of others is in and of itself alarming. However, this fact becomes,
to some extent, explainable when one takes into account the massive
Muslim casualties in different parts of the world – to which
little attention is given by the international community.
“You
started this war… I began to ask, why are all these Muslims
killed, and why are the Christians always ending up on top? I
started to study and to ask, and I discovered that your culture was
built on blood,” says Abdul Rehman, an Arab Taliban fighter, to
the Christian Science Monitor. “[Abdul Rehman,] a husband and
father of four children, admits that he didn’t start out as a
religious zealot. In fact, as a young man, he learned English and
planned to travel to America to enjoy ‘a beautiful life there.’ But current events in the
Middle East
prompted Rehman to turn to books, including Western history books,
and he came away from this education with a feeling that Western
civilization aimed to destroy Islamic culture and to kill Muslim
people, from Afghanistan to Kashmir, and from Chechnya to the Israeli-occupied
West Bank.”
Abdul
Rehman’s remarks are worth pondering.
From
September 29, 2000
to March 10, 2004, 2,397 Palestinian civilians – of whom 460 were minors under the
age of 18 – were killed by Israeli security forces in the Occupied
Territories, according to B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center
for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. (B’Tselem states that, on the other hand, 395 Israeli civilians,
of whom 74 were minors under the age of 18, were killed by
Palestinians).
But
the sufferings of the Palestinians are not limited to the period
from September 2000 to the present, nor are they limited to
killings; they go beyond that to house demolitions, detentions,
humiliation at checkpoints, etc.
In
addition to Palestinian casualties, in Iraq, over 10,000 civilians
were reportedly killed throughout the past year “as a direct
result” of the US-led war and occupation, according to an Amnesty
International report
released on March 18, 2004. “Scores of civilians have been killed
apparently as a result of excessive use of force by US troops… For
example, US soldiers have shot and killed scores of Iraqi
demonstrators in several incidents,” the report says.
Prior
to the 2003 invasion, comprehensive economic sanctions were imposed
on Iraq by the United Nations (sponsored by the US and UK governments) for more than 12 years, limiting the transfer of all
goods and services to the country. The outcome was the loss of more
than one million civilian lives, including 500,000 children under
the age of 5. This number of victims is more than the victims of Hiroshima
and much more than that of September 11.
More,
in Afghanistan, the number of civilian deaths caused by the military operations
has far surpassed the September 11 death toll.
Muslims
are also being slain in Chechnya, China, Kashmir, and the list goes on and on…
“I
began to ask, why are all these Muslims killed?”
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The
aforementioned facts might not necessarily justify why Muslim
suicide bombings have rocked throughout the world, but they at
least offer an explanation.
The
world has obviously been divided between those who strongly condemn
suicide bombings and the killing of civilians on the one hand, and
those who find such “martyr operations” to be the last resort
for Palestinians on the other. Additionally, there is a third group
who, instead of condemning or praising suicide bombings, prefer to
focus on the roots of the problem and the causes that lead Muslim
youngsters to choose that destiny for themselves.
Isabelle
Humphries – who worked as a freelance journalist and with
Palestinian human rights NGOs both in the “1948” Palestinian
community in Nazareth and across the West Bank
and Gaza – represents the last group. “As a Westerner I feel it is my
role to criticize the Israeli government, as it is recognized by my
government as a ‘democracy’… I feel that until we do something
about the suffering that Israel causes the Palestinians that we don’t have any business discussing
the rights and wrongs of strategies of resistance. As a wider
ideological commitment, as a human being, I feel obliged to criticize
the oppression by the powerful of the powerless. If, and when,
the Palestinians have the power to control the situation, I would
feel a greater imperative to critically comment on the strategy they
take, but until that day I feel I am in no position to
judge,” she writes.
In
fact, many Muslims wholeheartedly agree with the strategy of
resistance that the Palestinians have taken up. According to The
Guardian, polls reveal that 75% of the people in the Muslim
world are in favor of martyr operations – the term given by
Muslims to what is technically known as suicide bombing. Most
Muslims firmly reject the term “suicide bombings,” for reasons
discussed below.
Martyrdom
is one of every Muslim’s aims. It is stated in the Quran, “Think
not of those, who are slain in the way of Allah, as dead. Nay, they
are living. With their Lord they have provision. Jubilant (are they)
because of that which Allah hath bestowed upon them of His bounty,
rejoicing for the sake of those who have not joined them but are
left behind: that there shall no fear come upon them neither shall
they grieve. They rejoice because of favor from Allah and kindness,
and that Allah wasteth not the wage of the believers.” (Al `Imran:
169-71)
(It
is worth mentioning that martyrdom is not confined to death for
Allah’s sake; martyrs are also those who have died as a result of
some calamitous circumstances not of their own making.)
Most
Muslim scholars make a distinction between the operations carried
out by the Palestinians and the act of committing suicide –
thereby differentiating between the two terms “suicide bombings”
and “martyr operations” – on the basis that suicides kill
themselves out of despair, hopelessness and fear of suffering,
whereas martyrs sacrifice their lives, choosing to suffer death for
Allah’s sake, in the hope of furthering the Palestinian Cause.
Yet,
a majority of Muslim jurists consider it forbidden to target Jews
outside Palestine/Israel, on the grounds that they are not directly
involved in acts of aggression against Palestinians, even if they
support Israel. The same ruling applies, according to mainstream Muslim scholars,
to bombings that take place in other parts of the world that target
non-Muslim civilians, such as the September 11 attacks, Madrid
bombings, Riyadh bombings, etc., notwithstanding that, in the
statements issued to claim responsibility, the perpetrators usually
mention the Palestinian cause as one of the reasons that motivated
them to carry out those attacks.
The
militants’ position is endorsed by a minority of contemporary
Muslim scholars, who base their argument on the fact that Westerners
have harmed Muslim civilians and Muslim countries in every way, and
that it is Muslims’ right to defend themselves against aggression,
using the same methods used by the enemy. Most Muslim intellectuals,
however, firmly disagree with this argument, contending that Islam
strongly forbids violence against innocents.
“As
for those Jews… [who live] inside our occupied lands and carry the
Israeli nationality, they participate in the aggression against…
Palestinians. Our target should be military personnel and not
civilians when Israel does not attack our civilians. But as we can see nowadays, they
[Israelis] violate the lives of all Palestinians, civilians or
non-civilians… [h]ence, we have no other choice but to treat them
like with like to deter them,” writes Sheikh Faisal Mawlawi,
deputy chairman of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, in
his fatwa, or Islamic jurisprudential ruling (emphasis added).
On
Hamas’ website, hamasonline.org, a poem entitled “What Can I
Do?” reads,
Everyday,
The rumbling noise of tanks
Crushing cars are heard,
Everyday,
Exploding machine guns
Echo in the air,
Everyday,
Mountains of fire burn down
Our town...
What can I do...?
Each day,
The screams of mothers could be heard,
Each day,
The crying babies cry frantically,
Each day,
Men fight intensively...
What can I do?
Each time an explosion occurs,
Bodies fall,
Each time a cry of freedom is heard,
Souls are lost,
Each time a mother cries,
A loved one is gone...
Anger grows...
What can I do?
Break a sweat,
Shed a tear,
Lose my blood,
Sacrifice my soul?
YES!
Sara Khorshid is staff writer
for IslamOnline. She holds a BS in Political Science from Cairo University
and is currently studying for an MA in Journalism. You can reach her
at sarakhorshid@islamonline.net.
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