Feminism, Hamas-style

[mr mahs]

JAN. 15, 2004: FEMINISM, HAMAS-STYLE

A Breakthrough for Palestinian Women

The Palestinian radical Islamic group Hamas has just deployed its first female suicide bomber, Reem al-Raiyshi, a 22-year-old mother of two. Kind of puts the American debate about women in combat in a new perspective doesn’t it? Who says fundamentalist Islam is hostile to the aspirations of women?

But this breakthrough for Islamic feminism has some interesting aspects that aren’t being reported, not yet anyway. One question that immediately comes to mind: What happened to the suicide-bomber’s husband? According to early news reports, Raiyshi was married. Yet while she swears in her suicide video that she loved her soon-to-be orphaned three-year-old and 18-month-year-old, she had nothing to say about their father.

Is he alive? While the 800 or so Israeli casualties since September 2000 have mostly been women and children, the overwhelming majority of the 2000-plus Palestinian casualties have been men of military age. Yet one has to think that if Reem al-Raiyshi’s husband numbered among the casualties of Arafat’s terror war, his devoted widow would have mentioned him.

Is he a prisoner? Again, one would think that al-Raiyshi might have had a word or two to say.

So how to explain why he went unmentioned? Might he have divorced and abandoned her under Islamic law – and, still following that law, taken custody of her children? If so, could her abandonment and shame and the loss of her children party explain her willingness to kill and die? Could the twisted imaginations of the local Hamas chiefs have pointed suicide-murder out to her as a solution to her problems – a way to erase the shame of being discarded, a way to redeem herself in the eyes of her family, a way to acquire glory in the eyes of her children, and even a way to earn them some money: for Saudi money still continues to flow to the families of suicide bombers.

It’s a very striking thing how the Palestinian groups have profited from their own oppression of their local women. First they deprive them of all hope in life – then they exploit that hopelessness to make killers of them. Yasser Arafat’s Al Aqsa brigades have been using women bombers for many months now – and again and again one reads of them words to the effect of: “Her family was baffled by her action. They had just arranged a marriage for her, and they thought that she was looking forward to her new life ….”

These observations undergird a point that Richard Perle and I stress in An End to Evil: that the war on terror is not just a battle on the ground – it is a battle of ideas: extremist Islam against democracy and freedom, including freedom for women. The self-described realists who promise that Middle Eastern autocracies can guarantee US security and the flow of oil if only we refrain from “destabilizing” them are deluding themselves. The cruel “stability” of Middle Eastern life is precisely what is creating the terrorists. The region needs – and Americans need – an emancipating wave of destabilization that shatters for good and all the prestige and credibility of the murderous imams of Hamas and its supporters in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region

[pattbateman]

dumb bitches are everywhere i guess

at least our country isnt the only one blessed with them!

[guyman1966]

She was hot. What a waste.

[babbo]

Originally posted by guyman1966

She was hot. What a waste.

dont get attatched- there will be more - to blow themselves up !!!