The Down Syndrome Bombers: Terrorism Sinks to New Low
Just when suicide attacks stopped shocking the world came the news that Baghdad bombings were committed by two Down syndrome women wired to explode. Aaron Hanscom wonders if there could be any act more depraved than turning a mentally disabled person into a human bomb. The most horrific part: it's becoming a trend.
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Last week’s horrific bombings at two pet bazaars in Baghdad reacquainted us with the most disturbing type of suicide bomber: the unwitting martyr.
Had the perpetrators of the attacks that killed at least 99 people been young men who believed self-immolation was their one-way ticket to paradise, the story would have never made headlines. While voluntary martyrdom operations in Western countries still occur infrequently enough to shock the public into recognizing (however belatedly or temporarily) the brutality of radical Islamists, they have become old news in Iraq. One can’t help but wonder if there will come a time when the headline “Mentally Retarded Women Used in Bombings” no longer appalls us.
Because that moment has fortunately not yet arrived, Friday’s terrorist attacks were effective reminders of the utter depravity of jihadists. According to U.S. and Iraqi officials, pictures of the two female bombers showed they had Down syndrome. Their remote detonated bombs went off in locations thronged with families and children. “It appears the suicide bombers were not willing martyrs, they were used by al-Qaeda for these horrific attacks,” Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, the top U.S. commander in Baghdad, told the AP.
Hammond pointed out the obvious when he stated that the “two suicide vest attacks represent the worst of human nature.” (For those who question the accuracy of the term “Islamo-fascist,” it should be remembered that the Nazis systematically murdered the mentally handicapped.) More surprising responses came from those less determined to see American forces prevail in Iraq. For example, in a post arguing that the U.S. surge in Iraq has failed, Libby of Newshoggers described the bombings as a “sign of adaptation and a brilliant one at that.”
There’s no doubt that the use of the mentally disabled for terrorist operations serves a tactical purpose. Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee explains that this tactic “tells us that al-Qaeda in Iraq recognizes that attempts to use male suicide bombers and vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs), their preferred method of suicide attacks for those seeking martyrdom, are no longer effective.” What it also tells us, however, is that radical Islamists have no respect for human life and will not hesitate to employ the most barbaric methods to achieve their goals.
In fact, this was only the latest — not the first — instance of mentally disabled individuals being used unwittingly as human bombs. Last year, Brian Glyn Williams noted that the employment of suicide bombers who are mentally unsound has become a disturbing trend in Afghanistan. “Coalition troops who have spoken of seeing bombers blow themselves up far from their convoys have characterized it as the act of drugged or mentally unstable bombers,” he wrote on the website of The Jamestown Foundation. Williams told Time magazine that the Taliban regularly recruits young men who are “deranged, retarded, mentally unstable or on drugs.” A 2007 NPR report also found that a substantial number of suicide bombers in Afghanistan suffer from mental illnesses.
Israeli soldiers recently disarmed a retarded young man wearing an explosive vest. He had been sent to an Israeli checkpoint by Palestinian terrorists. Meanwhile, IRIN has reported that dozens of mentally handicapped children are being used to fight in Iraq. In January 2005, Iraq’s interior minister said that terrorists used a disabled child (police reported that the child appeared to have Down syndrome) as one of the suicide bombers behind attacks on election day. Last year, two children with mental problems were put in the back seat of a car that was subsequently blown up in a suicide attack in Baghdad’s Adhamiyah neighborhood.
A local NGO spokesperson explained how these children are “recruited”:
Some children were given by their families but many others were kidnapped by insurgents when they knew that those children had mental problems. Some of them were even taken from the doors of their houses or schools.
Abu Ahmed is a spokesman for al-Qaeda in Iraq and was quoted by IRIN. He spoke about 13-year-old Barak Muhammad, a mentally handicapped boy who was sold to the terrorist group by his father.
We’re doing a favour to Barak. We’re giving him the chance to be useful and not suffer daily beatings from his father. Here, with us, he gets Islamic lessons and is soon going to be a good fighter and maybe one day even become a suicide bomber in the name of God.
Ahmed’s celebration of death could not be more at odds with Western values. To highlight this difference, contrast the life of Barak with that of Lior Lieblings, a 13-year-old boy with Down syndrome who is the subject of the new documentary Praying with Lior (the film opened in New York on the same day as the bombings in Iraq). That Lior is an inspiration to those around him is evident from the trailer, which shows him eagerly preparing for his approaching Bar Mitzvah.
But it is Lior’s brother who delivers the most stinging rebuke to al-Qaeda and its perverted sense of what it means to act in the name of God: “If there is a God, then Lior is definitely closer to God than anybody else I know.”
Aaron Hanscom is a Los Angeles-based editor for Pajamas Media.
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15 Comments
Nancy Kobrin, Ph.D.:There is a definite link to Nazi ideology Lebenswert. I discussed this recently with Phyllis Chesler. I have written about this on line concerning Christian Ganczarski the Al Qaeda operative and the Djerba Synagogue Bombing. I had access to Ganczarski’s deposition given to German police. My former doctoral student David Van Dyke helped with the translation.
articleÔøΩhttp://www.geradts.com/anil/ij/vol_008_no_002/papers/paper001.html
Here is the passage:ÔøΩ
ÔøΩpredictably named — Mohamed. When the baby turns one and a half years old, Ganczarski abruptly uproots the entire family moving back to Germany. The Saudi fairy-tale comes to an end. Repeating the trauma of his fatherÔøΩs move back to Germany, the son’s is fraught with similar difficulties…
At this point in the deposition, Ganczarski waxes philosophical, mentioning that he and his wife had long discussed the fact that they did not wish to raise their children in a non-Muslim country though they are now back in Germany. His choice of words is chilling: Besonders im Hinblick auf die Erziehung der Kinder ist das Leben in einem islamischen Land im islamischen Sinne lebenswerter . [ trans. Especially with respect to the education of children, it is more worthwhile living life in an Islamic country in an Islamic fashion, that is, meaning under Sharia, Islamic law]58
Lebenswert is a Nazi code word implying that there were other lives, which did not merit living such as the life of a Jew. In Nazi Germany the Jews along with the homosexuals, congenitally deformed and mentally retarded were called lebensunwertes Leben , that is, ÔøΩlife unworthy of life.ÔøΩ This was the Nazi code word that justified medical experimentation, eugenic abortion and eventually the death camps. Lebenswert points to the dehumanization of life, which is the exact objective of suicide bombing. Those lives destroyed in a dehumanized way have a counterpoint in Nazi ideology, the practice of Lebensborn , and the stud farms where Aryans procreated. Usama bin Laden and his jihadis have their own Lebensborn called polygamy. Along with Usama’s obsession for breeding ÔøΩ be they Arabian horses or genetically engineered agricultural seeds suitable for the Sudan fit like hand and glove with Nazi ideology. Beliefs drive behavior, most especially paranoid delusional ones which inevitably have to do with sexual hang-ups.
Feb 4, 2008 - 6:00 am sharinlite:I came to my philosophy of humanity after decades of simply watching the world. 98% of the world’s population are just trying to survive. 2% are trying to do the work to help the world. Within the 98% are the 10% of sadists, serial murderers, abusers of children, women and men economically, emotionally, sexually, physically and ideologically. It has been thus for the entire time “mankind” has been trying to get civilized, but nothing changes the basic percentages. The 10% in a fair and just world, would be executed immediately!
Feb 4, 2008 - 7:56 am Valle:Not the banality of evil–the hideousness of evil…
Feb 4, 2008 - 7:56 am Suzanne:This is absolutely horrifying…A very important article indeed and one that highlights just how serious this threat is.
Feb 4, 2008 - 8:36 am Annie Jacobsen:Where are the mothers of these children?
Feb 4, 2008 - 8:46 am LT Nixon:All these terrorists care about is effect. The ends justify the means, no matter how grotesque the methodology in employing their tactic. Thank heavens the Iraqis are sick of it and the terrorists are going to lose in Iraq. It’s places like Pakistan I’m concerned about…
Feb 4, 2008 - 11:08 am Dark Helmet:What I don’t understand is why anyone would be shocked in any way as to what people who want to die are willing to do to kill others.
All the mullas have to die, at the same time. It will suddenly end.
You can’t kill a snake by starting at the very end of it’s tail.
Flesh and blood are stronger that steel.
What is the power of steel when compared to the hand that weilds it?
Kill the snake.
Feb 4, 2008 - 12:42 pm Morton Doodslag:Annie Jacobson asks “Where are the mothers…?”
Most in the West cannot conceive of the mentality we’re dealing with. We attempt to compare Islam with Nazism, communism, and other malignant ideologies. We pretend or imagine that women in Islam are yearning to break free from the shackles of their slavery. That mothers in Islam would not sell their children, or support their Islamic upbringing if given half a chance. We cannot imagine parents willingly “giving” their children to Jihad, or selling their children as Muslims do across the globe, and even here in the West. We pretend that the vast majority of Muslims want what we want, and that we can somehow find ways to live together with them.
If Muslims adhere to Islam, they adhere to an ideology which is nearly in complete opposition to our own. Their surrender to the fatalism of Allah’s immutable will also means they surrender the very notions of conscience, individual freedom, ethics, and tolerance which are a foundation of our society. They therefor pose a grave threat to our society. If Muslims on the other hand aren’t terribly strict in their adherence to Islam, then may be able to coexist within our society temporarily. But there will always be the threat and possibility that they or there offspring will ( for whatever reason ) begin following the tenets of Islam. At that point, the full panoply of Islamic horrors resurges anew. All Muslims are therefore a threat, and should not remain in the West.
Feb 4, 2008 - 12:49 pm David Thomson:“If Muslims adhere to Islam, they adhere to an ideology which is nearly in complete opposition to our own.”
This is why I normally reject the term Islamic fascism and prefer describing them instead as nihilists. They do the share the view of the Judeo-Christian traditions that the world is God’s gift to the human race. No, it is supposedly a vile place and death should be eagerly sought after.
Feb 4, 2008 - 1:31 pm Mark Stewart:When I heard this news, I found a certain clarity with regard to the treatment of al Qaeda detainees:
Waterboard them? Hell, you can shoot ‘em out of circus cannons at a great big bullseye on the Hoover Dam next SuperBowl halftime for all I care.
Feb 4, 2008 - 2:01 pm Francois Krodel:Are there any muslim organizations in the West denouncing these acts? How about “human rights” and “peace” groups?
Or is it as usual the sound of crickets in the background?
Feb 4, 2008 - 2:03 pm Mickey Free:Ever since the war on terror began, I have been unsure of how to view al-qaeda and the terrorists. Sometimes I even thought that maybe we created ths monster and that our foreign policy was to blame for their existence. Now, my eyes have been opened. They are no longer a poitical movement opposed to our way of life in my eyes. They are the modern incarnation of evil. This is an evil on par with Nazi Germany. When I read this article I became so enraged that my face became flush and my heart raced. I now see that these people are not to be negotiated with. They are not even to be engaged in war. They are to be exterminated like cockroaches.
Feb 4, 2008 - 6:26 pm RE:Beslan is still the low water mark for me. But I have no doubt the Islamists can go lower.
Feb 4, 2008 - 8:17 pm AJ:The PhD lady, and many others, complicate such matters unnecessarily. These are EVIL people and no moral relativism between these hideous extremists and “Christian or Jewish Extremists” that the media uses, need be used.
I’m sure Barack Hussein Obama will step up and deal with them. Ha!
Feb 5, 2008 - 9:08 am Roy M. Postel:It is reassuring to read comments expressing outrage at the use of people with down syndrome deployed as suicide bombers. Unfortunately, it is not “new” as this story implies in its headline. This has been a consistent trademark of radical Islam.
What is new, however, is the mention of this fact on U.S. newswire coverage. Do a search of this event and you will see most of the mention of the down syndrome angle was carried by non-U.S. papers. I have to ask why is this despicable fact now getting some exposure in America–is it because the bombing occurred in a market for house pets?
Network T.V. news has yet to feature this angle so this side of Alqeada has yet to reach the kitchen table of Middle America. This is just one more example of the treasonus bias by the MSM in reporting only half truths from Iraq. The effort to paint radical Islam as victim is just shameful.
Anyone who has interacted with someone born with down syndrome can attest to the unconditional trust and love given by these individuals. Of course, this truth might be lost on the media and medical eletes who measure the value of life only for its utility.
Maybe the reluctance by network news execs and big city newspaper editors to feature this angle is the fact if falls right in line with their blind prompotion of Planned Parenthood and the progressive agenda of eugenics.
Feb 5, 2008 - 2:45 pm