Itamar Marcus (who has Southern California Jewish college communities all abuzz with his planned trip at the beginning”of February, when he’ll be making the rounds, giving lectures, meeting with student leaders, and participating in UC Irvine’s Israel week) and Barbara Crook lay out an interesting psychological analysis of the value-system that drives Palestinian baby killers. Their argument is that the conventional wisdom – which holds that Palestinians weigh the positive value of killing Jews against the negative value of losing their lives – is inaccurate. Rather, the value system that drives these murderers places a positive value both on killing Jewish children and on dying as such. We are twice removed from Patton – the goal here is not so much to die for one’s country, but if need be merely to die and move on to the next life. Rather than embracing death in a nationalistic cause or for a political goal, the weird congruence of Islam, militarism, and specific history in Palestinian culture has created an almost primitive cult of death.
Marcus and Crook probably overreach at some points – say what you will about the Palestinians, but they have always been one of the more secular societies in the Arab world. That’s not saying much, I know, but given the opportunity (and I don’t mean a peace deal – I mean the liquidation of Hamas and Islamic Jihad by Israeli force), many older Palestinians that are today too terrified to express their secular nationalistic preferences would speak out. Don’t confuse a secular society with a society that would accept Israel – Egypt and Syria were at their most dangerous when they were firmly secular rather than torn internally between Islam and secularism. Israel would thus still need to fear attack from such a Palestinian state, and that state might very likely be terroristic, but it need not be Islamist to be either of those things.
But it is precisely this faith that I place in the desire of older Palestinians to create a secular society that makes the rest of this article so chilling. It is becoming more and more difficult to deny that we’re now into the second generation of Palestinian children that are being brainwashed in the most surreal and disgusting ways into embracing death as a cause in itself. They recount this show from Palestinian children’s television (this is Sesame Street for Palestinian boys and girls):
In a chilling talk show interview on PA TV, two 11-year-old girls explain cheerfully and eloquently what they and their young friends desire:
Walla: Shahada is very, very beautiful. Everyone aspires to shahada. What could be better than going to paradise?
Host: What is better, peace and full rights for the Palestinian people or shahada?
Walla: Shahada.
Yussra: Of course shahada is sweet. We don’t want this world, we want the Afterlife. We benefit not from this life but from the Afterlife… Every Palestinian child aged, say 12, says “Oh Lord, I would like to become a shahid.”
Public opinion polls indicate that Yussra and Walla represent an overwhelming majority of Palestinian children who embrace this belief. According to three different polls, 70 to 80 percent of Palestinian children aspire to shahada.
These shows, incidentally, are paid for with funds secured for the Palestinians by Shimon Peres, who, willing to try everything for peace in the mid 1990s, went around the world with a metaphorical tin cup begging Western governments to give the PA legitimacy and money. Of course, he wouldn’t still be fetishistically funding these programs today when the incitement is so clear, were the decision up to him and not up to the UN and EU like it is.
UPDATE: LGF has some sarcastic comments on this story too.
Related Mere Rhetoric Posts:
