Murder In the guise of honour

[knowjesus_knowlove]

DISGUSTING: The following commentary was published in the Feb. 9 edition of

The New Republic.

Ideology is notoriously incapable of describing reality truthfully, which
is why its career is regularly marked by disappointment; but sometimes the
de******ion is so false that it seems not so much a mistake as a willful
misrepresentation based on a dogma or a desire.

The recent history of the Israeli?Palestinian conflict has provided a
textbook lesson in the confounding of progressivism by the particulars of
history. How, after all, can the Palestinians, so hallowed on the left,
allow their noble antiZionist cause, their magnificent road to statehood,
to be advanced by such means as suicide bombing worse, by suicide bombing
animated by the supremely regressive spirit of militant Islam?

This is not exactly what Fanon had in mind. But it gets worse. Consider the
recent horror of Reem Salah Al Reyashi, the 22?year?old mother of two small
children, who blew herself and four Israelis to bits at a border crossing
in Gaza on Jan. 14. Is this how Palestinian women are supposed to discover
their historical agency? (Llamas is turning increasingly to terrorist women
because terrorist men are more easily spotted by the Israeli police.)
Where is the wrath of the feminists?

Then the Israeli paper Yediot Aharonot reported that this twisted woman's
action had nothing whatsoever to do with historical agency: She was forced
to do the deed as penance for an extramarital affair.

Strictly speaking, those four Israelis died not in a suicide bombing but in
an honour killing.

The details are breathtaking. The woman's lover strapped the bomb around
her waist, and the woman's husband drove her to the scene. Her family did
not set up the customary tent of mourning for her, since her religious and
political glory was born of sexual and familial disgrace.

Her husband subsequently denied the story of his wife's adultery, praising
her as "an honourable woman who sacrificed her life for the sake of Islam
and Palestine." Oh, and as a good mother.

Who are these "activists" for whom adultery is more heinous than murder? Is
such a mentality not as repulsive, not as much of an obstacle to peace, as
an "outpost" on a hill near Nablus? But the progressives of the day, the
peace processors and the road?mappers, the diabolizers of Israel (or ? this
is the more measured view ? of Ariel Sharon), have somehow managed to
stifle their disgust.

THE NEW REPUBLI