Choosing Death

The latest on the cult of death from the indispensible Palestinian Media Watch:

Mother upon news of son’s death in an Israeli air strike: “We had always hoped for his [my son’s] Martyrdom (Shahada), knowing he wanted to die as a Martyr (Shahid). Every time he went out, we would say to him, ‘May Allah be with you.’ We knew that he wanted to die as a Martyr. Praise to Allah, he sought Martyrdom, and he achieved it. My message to every mother is to sacrifice her child for Palestine."
Second woman: “By Allah, we welcome every Martyr as if he were a groom among us.”

[PA TV (Fatah), Feb. 11, 2010]

“O heroes, Allah has promised you victory. . . . Do not talk yourselves into flight. . . .
Your enemies seek life while you seek death.
They seek spoils to fill their empty stomachs while you seek a Garden [Paradise] as wide as are the heavens and the earth. . . .
Death is not bitter in the mouth of the believers. These drops of blood that gush from your bodies will be transformed tomorrow into blazing red meteors that will fall down upon the heads of your enemies.” 

[Reading and Texts Part II, Grade 8, p. 16. Schoolbook currently in use in PA schools.]

There it is—the deep, the fundamental nightmare of the Israelis: “Your enemies seek life while you seek death.”

  

How are the citizens of the Jewish State—for whom, as for all Jews, the essential (if difficult to fulfil) demand from God is Choose Life And Be Grateful For It (see Jerusalem Girl below); who’d desperately love to be sending their children off to grapple with literature, or physics, or even macramé after high school, but must send them off to grapple instead with an adversary that hides in hospitals and mosques and uses women and children as shields; who mourn as a nation every child of Israel killed in action; who cherish every drop of shed Jewish blood as if it were the living breathing person; whose enemies slosh through the blood of their own fallen brothers as if it were so much rain water—how are Israelis ever going to make peace with people whose death-worship is so wide and so deep that they’ve turned mothers—who’ve felt unborn life fluttering, hiccupping, kicking; and later the indescribable pleasure of the scent and feel of their babies heavy with sleep in their arms; the first enthralling toothless smiles; the first glorious infant belly laughs; heard the أمي, “Ommy!” for the first thrilling time; and wiped away the first tears of hurt—into zombies who seek and celebrate the deaths of their own children?