How much can a person take before snapping?
By Stuart Littlewood – London
'The suicide bomber wrote that he began to live the day he came to know he was to die. Where did he get this passion to kill?' -- Mahesh Bhatt
Here in the civilised West we hate suicide bombers with a passion.
We’re taught that the proper way to blow fellow humans to smithereens is to do it from 40,000 feet.
Or failing that, send Apache helicopter gun-ships at street level firing their laser-guided missiles and 30mm cannon.
Or failing that, turn loose our main battle tanks to shred and vaporize the “enemy”, reduce their homes to rubble with DU shells and spread birth defects for generations to come.
Nowadays we don’t even have to leave home to do it. We can train our really brainy chaps to steer armed drones to the target from the comfort of an armchair.
B-52s, F-16s, Apaches, drones and tanks… that’s the ticket. Awesome hardware gives any murky mission a moral superiority that gets nods of approval from the governing élite in the drawing rooms of London and Washington.
What is not acceptable is delivering the high explosive in person, all the way to the target, and looking your enemy in the eye as you push the detonator. That simply isn’t cricket.
Millions of people who have been oppressed and suffered even worse situations have not resorted to suicide bombings. This guy's manipulative attempt cheapens the cause he claims to support. The mentality of those who use and recruit those poor souls, those who brainwash the pathetic people into marchng around praising such sickness, all of it must be called what it is; disgusting garbage. The religious underpinnings used to justify this crap should be condemned without equivocation...not because of what I or any other Westerner thinks, but because it is a DEAD END for the Palestinians.
ReplyDelete<span><span>Don't you find it intriguing that for a westerner suicide bombing is the ultimate evil but dropping a 10 ton bomb on a whole building is nothing special?
ReplyDeleteA very famous American Jewish journalist, (an old lady, her name escapes me now but she famously interviewed president Kennedy and other presidents) was in Ausralia a monrth ago and she was interviewed on TV by Andrew Denton who asked her what she thought of suicide bombing because Australians he said, think of it as the ultimate evil. To my surprise, she was furious and she asked him in return how could he not compare it to any other action like flattening whole neighbourhoods with cruise missiles or tons of bombs...She also added that she didn't believe that the motives were religious and one should be looking at what the people went through..The only thing about her that I found amusing was that not for a moment she mentioned Israel's acts only the American actions in Iraq!! Interesting selective reasoning...
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<span>Who says Westerners think it is the ultimate evil besides this Littlewood guy? I don't think it is the ultimate evil, but I sure see it as a terrible evil and certainly a very dumb tactic for the Palestinians to use. Tell me what gains were made for the Palestinian people by any of the acts of the suicide bombers? I think it could be proven that the Palestinians are actually worse off!</span>
ReplyDelete<span>Plus, in my opinion, if suicide bombings again become the weapon of choice in another intifada, the Palestinians will lose the sympathy and support that have been steadily growing. They will be playing right into Israel's hands.</span>
ReplyDelete<span>I agree, they're worse off..It had a stigmatising effect..But things aren't that simple either. As with planes' Hijackings of the 70s which attracted the world's opinion to the Palestinian issue, suicide bombings while demonising them also highlighted the utter desperation and the necessity to solve this problem, but overall it had a devastating effect on the cause...</span>
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