Children Recruited As Human Bombs!

A Wish Before Dying by David Parsons

The media circus surrounding the release of nuclear spy Mordechai Vanunu served up many peculiar details about his life, but the one that stood out the most to me is that a grown man should need "adoptive parents". It appears some dear old couple from Minnesota read about this lonely, mistreated figure in a "progressive" journal and decided he was in dire need of parental care.

A few weeks earlier, a far more worthy candidate for adoption was caught in the media spotlight at an IDF checkpoint near Nablus. A smallish 16 year old Palestinian boy named Husam Abdu, mocked and tormented by his schoolmates for being "slow", stood frozen with fear. Aided by a robot, Israeli soldiers gingerly helped him remove a suicide bomb vest that he had been coaxed into wearing for the paltry sum of 100 shekels and the promise of heavenly virgins.

"My friends at school make fun of me." he said later. "They call me 'Brains' but they also make fun of me because I'm small and ugly. They call me 'The Ugly Dwarf'. It hurt so much I wanted to kill myself."

"Since I am studying the Koran, I know about the good life which awaits [in paradise]. The people who gave me the suicide belt told me this was my only chance to have sex."

Back home, Husam's mother was upset that her son had been recruited for a suicide mission, but added that she would not have objected had he been over 18.

Only days earlier, an even younger Palestinian boy - 10 year old Abdullah Quran - was caught trying to courier a bomb inside a schoolbag through the same checkpoint. Seeing that he was detained, his handlers nearly turned him into a unwitting suicide bomber by cell-phone, but the device failed to detonate. Israeli authorities quickly sent him home, where he was lionized by classmates even while denying the entire incident to the press.

IN NORMAL SOCIETIES, these two young boys would have been whisked away to foster homes in no time flat. No one would have allowed either child to return to that culture of death - an environment where kids are brainwashed into thinking the highest aspiration in life is to "knock on the gates of paradise with the skulls of Zionists".

Yet when two of the greatest peddlers of this mind poisoning - Hamas leaders Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rastisi - were meticulously removed from the scene, most of the world condemned it as unlawful and unjustified. For some reason, the crippled cleric and perverse pediatrician are deemed entitled to an immunity from harm that they cruelly denied to Israeli children and even their own Palestinian sons and daughters.

There is some solace in the hope that, one day, all the rest of those Palestinians who behind this monstrous machinery of child sacrifice will be brought before a Nurenberg-style tribunal and tried as the detestable war criminals that they are. In the meantime, it is hard to bear the skewed morality at work in our world today, especially among those who sympathize with Israel's enemies.

This is a world where traitor and spy is embraced as a hero and offered a luxury seaside flat. Where a cold-hearted cleric is deemed a harmless and untouchable holy man. Where the 13 most despicable murderers in Bethlehem are escorted off to subsidized lives of comfort in Europe.

Yet no one has enough compassion and decency to stretch out a hand to little Husam and offer to take him away from this dark world that sought to drive him into an early grave.

(The above article is from Middle East Digest)