The PLO Recruits Suicide Bombers

A report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media.  This week’s item is from Independent News and Media, United Kingdom, December 3, 2001, with a headline, “Bomber quits intelligence service to join Hamas two days before attack.”  The Jerusalem bombers were identified by Israeli and Palestinian sources as Osama Bahar and Nabil Halbiyeh both in their twenties.  The Haifa bomber was Maher Habashi, 21, a plumber from Nablus recruited by Hamas.  Halbiyeh resigned as an officer in the Palestinian Intelligence Service two days before the bombings and announced that he was joining Hamas.  Israeli security forces raided Abu Dis the home village of Bahar and Halbiyeh on the Eastern fringe of Jerusalem yesterday and arrested about ten of their family members and friends.  Habashi’s father learned of his son’s fate when Hamas supporters came to congratulate him.  His son had been preparing for his wedding.  The three brought to thirty the number of Palestinians who have blown themselves up since the intifada broke out fourteen months ago.  Islamic leaders say young Palestinians are lining up by the hundreds in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to volunteer for suicide missions.  Eyad Sarraj, the director of the Gaza community mental health project detects a wide-spread zeal.  If they are turned down, he told the Independent, they become depressed.  They feel they have been deprived of the ultimate award of dying for God.  Palestinian opinion polls show a sharp rise in support for suicide attacks.  Before the intifada it ranged from 20 to 25%.  It is now between 70 and 80%.

Tom:

Dave, this is an issue that many Americans, they can’t fathom this at all.  When this program is released I am sure there will be many more.  It seems even right now as we are discussing this issue, just yesterday, there were more suicide bombers.  How do we fathom this?  

Dave:

Well, there is only one religion that can cause this, only one motivation that can cause this and we have discussed it in our newsletter.  Those who don’t get it are welcome to get it, we send it out free each month, and we’ve discussed it, I think, on some programs.  This is because of the teaching that there is no sure way to know whether you will get to Paradise except to die in jihad.  Now some people say, well, if you die on a Hajj on the way to Mecca—how can you be sure you will die on a hajj you will know?Not likely.  And, there is no possible way,—I think we have quoted or we have in the newsletter—Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law, first caliph to succeed him.  He was promised Paradise without martyrdom by Muhammad and yet he said, “Even if I had one foot inside of Paradise I couldn’t trust Allah, he might not let me in.”  Of 99 characteristics of Allah in the Qur’an not one is love.  So, the only sure way is to die in jihad.  And what awaits you? A palace of pearls with 70 mansions inside and inside each mansion are 70 houses and each house a bed with 70 sheets, on each one sits a Houri, a dark-eyed virgin with lips like rose petals, whose virginity returns every time you have sex with her.  The tables are a mile long, loaded with delicacies, the rivers run with wine. They are promised they will have the strength and appetite of a hundred men for food and sex.  This is fed to these little boys.  Arafat runs summer camps in the PLO territory where they train them.  You have several million in Pakistan training.  These are the heroes, these are not NFL or NBA heroes, these are the guys that end up on pictures and posters and so forth.  Arafat’s Al Hayat al Jadida, official newspaper, the very day, Sept. 11, but in a different time zone, so, a few hours before the World Trade Center was hit—it said that the suicide bombers are the cream of society, they are the successors of those who taught the Americans a tough lesson in Lebanon—in other words, knocked down that barracks and killed several hundreds Marines.  And, they are the cream of society, they are the future, they are the best people we’ve got, and then, down come the towers.  And now Arafat is going to say that he is opposed to this!  In his newspaper you have wedding announcements, the guys who went through Bethlehem a few weeks ago, and they were also Arafat’s police, spraying bullets and killing people.  They had made a video just before and they said, “We don’t want any mourning at our funeral, this is our winning and we want sweets to be passed out.”  The parents of suicide bombers put notices in the paper.  They are in Al Hayat al Jadida, the official newspaper, and they are announcing the wedding—“Come to the reception for the wedding of our son.  He was married to the dark-eyed ones in Paradise.”

Tom:

Dave, there is also, not just this eternal reward, so called, but there are temporal rewards as well for those who are married; their family is taken care of, their children are taken care of as they become a martyr for the cause for the state.  So, you know, there is some flesh involved here, there is some political emphasis, as it were.

Dave:

The Ayatollah Khomeini said the purest joy in Islam is to kill and be killed for God.  Muhammad promised paradise to those who die in jihad.  There is no question about it.  Why did everybody know these were Muslims?  You didn’t think they were Presbyterians or Southern Baptists.  They weren’t Israelis, they weren’t evangelical Christians, we knew they were Muslims because only Islam promises that if you die in jihad you have this reward awaiting you.  Everyone knew that because Muslims are the terrorists all over the world.So, they are trying to explain this away and say that this doesn’t really go and so forth and that this is peace.  It’s absurd!  I would like to know where Islam brought peace ever once, anywhere in the world.