Islam’s Suicide Solution
As if it were not already enormous, the gulf between Islam and Christianity grew even greater in January when Reem Rayashi, a 22-year-old Palestinian mother of two, blew herself up at the Erez Crossing in the Gaza Strip. Posing as a cripple with a metal plate in her leg, Rayashi cried that her leg hurt and begged the Israeli soldiers to have mercy on her and let her pass through the checkpoint into the industrial complex in Israel where six thousand Palestinians work. She had set off the metal detector. When a guard took pity on her, she detonated her explosives and became the seventh female suicide-bomber since 27-year-old Wafa Idris blew herself up in January 2002 in a Jerusalem shopping mall, killing one Israeli and wounding 131.
In her pre-suicide videotape, a tradition with suicide-bombers, Rayashi cradled a rifle as she told of her childhood dream to become a so-called martyr: “It was always my wish to turn my body into deadly shrapnel against the Zionists and to knock on the doors of heaven with the skulls of Zionists,” she said.
However, killing herself may have been less of a dream than her video suggests. Rayashi, the first woman suicide-bomber dispatched by Hamas, was, in fact, an adulteress “who was forced to carry out the attack to restore her family’s honor,” reported the Israeli news agency Arutz-7.
Hamas originally hesitated to use women. Now, however, the Islamic terrorist organization encourages it when a woman’s chance of success exceeds that of a man’s or when the woman requires “atonement” for family-related sins.
Arutz-7 reported that Rayashi’s “illicit lover recruited her and gave her the suicide bomb belt.” Furthermore, “PA [Palestinian Authority] security officials said her husband drove her to Erez to carry out the attack.”
Afterward, Rayashi’s family refused to speak to reporters, “a rarity in these cases, and did not set up a mourning tent for her,” Arutz-7 reported.
In the world of Islam, women are considered inferior to men and adulteresses are often killed by their relatives to restore honor to the disgraced family. Forgiveness is unavailable; and the power of Jesus Christ to transform broken lives through faith in His atoning sacrifice is unknown.
Whereas Christianity teaches of love and of a God who forgives sinners and provides eternal life as a free gift through faith in Jesus (Jn. 3:16; Rom. 6:23; Ti. 3:5; 1 Jn. 1:9), Islam teaches only judgment. Muslims are indoctrinated from childhood that the only certain way to reach Paradise is by becoming a martyr for Allah.
Over the years the Palestinian leadership has exploited this Islamic teaching in its fight to destroy Israel. By glorifying terror- ism and using their schools and pulpits to promote vicious anti- Israel, anti-Jewish—and now, anti-American—propaganda, the Palestinians have reared a generation that functions on hate rather than love and craves death more than life.
By blowing herself up “for Allah,” Rayashi believed she had found a solution to her problem and a way into Paradise.
Islamic men are promised seventy-two dark-eyed virgins as their reward for being suicide-bombers. Hamas leader Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi told reporter Barbara Victor that women martyrs receive “satisfaction.” “There is no competition between men and women,” he said. “Everyone gets what they want and are their own master. They achieve total satisfaction after death.”1
Hamas says the streets are lined with women begging for a chance to become suicide bombers “for Allah.” Another Hamas official told Victor, “In Bethlehem alone there are two hundred girls willing and ready to sacrifice themselves for Palestine, and obviously it is much easier for women to go through checkpoints.”2
A Shia Muslim cleric calls these women the authors of a “new, glorious history for Arab and Muslim women.” And that “glorious” history is making its way across continents.
At the Swedish Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm, an exhibit opened in January that immortalized Hanady Jaradat, a 29-year-old lawyer from Jenin who murdered twenty Israelis and wounded fifty-one others when she blew herself up in the Maxim restaurant in Haifa in October 2003.
Called “Snow White and the Madness of Truth,” the exhibit included a swimming pool-like structure filled with red water to symbolize blood and a sailboat floating peacefully by, bearing a picture of Jaradat. The exhibit also contained these words: “As white as snow, as red as blood, and her hair was as black as ebony and the red looked beautiful upon the white.”
Infuriated, Zvi Mazel, Israel’s ambassador to Sweden, walked around the pool unplugging wires. Said Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, “It was an artistic expression glorifying or justifying terrorism.”
Jaradat was female “martyr” number six. Before her was Hiba Daraghmeh, a 19-year-old English literature major who gave up her dream of teaching English to blow herself to bits at a mall in the northern Israeli town of Afula in May 2003. She was recruited by Islamic Jihad, which later praised all its women terrorists in a pamphlet distributed in universities and published on its Web site. The pamphlet said these women have “exchanged their perfume for the smell of the land and wear weapons on their arms instead of jewelry.”
Wafa Idris, who would have been considered defiled because she was divorced, is an icon today, venerated as “the bride of Heaven.” A women’s suicide-bomber unit has been named in her honor.
According to Pravda, Russia’s major news agency, Arab mercenaries are training female suicide-bombers there as well. In December 2003 two women carried out an attack near the Kremlin by detonating a device in a handbag. One of the women also wore an explosives belt packed with nails and metal pieces, like those worn by Palestinian terrorists.
But the main target so far is Israel. “We will eventually win and have an Islamic state on all the land of what is now Israel, including all of the West Bank and Gaza,” said al-Rantisi.3
In the end, Hamas’s goal is no different from Adolf Hitler’s. As the German dictator embroiled the world in war and sought new, more heinous ways to perfect genocide, he preached, “Today Germany, tomorrow the world.”
In commenting on Reem Rayashi and her suicide attack, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar declared, “She is not going to be the last because the march of resistance will continue until the Islamic flag is raised, not only on the minarets of Jerusalem, but over the whole universe.”
ENDNOTES
- Barbara Victor, Army of Roses (n.p.: Rodale, 2003), 114.
- Ibid., 31.
- Ibid., 57.
