 | File under "enemy propaganda." |
By Nidal al-Mughrabi, Reuters
Abu Mohammed picked up his rifle, said farewell to his wife and six children and went out to face the Israeli tanks, helicopter gunships and missile-firing airborne drones.
"Don't hold lunch, honey! I'm off to fight the Zionists!"
"Will you be home in time for dinner? We're having chicken ala caliph." |
"Being unable to defeat Israel is no reason to surrender," the Hamas fighter said with a smile as he headed to the Gaza Strip's front line last Saturday, ignoring pleas from his family to stay.
| "Danger? I laugh! Haw haw!" |
"My children and wife are very dear to me," he said. "But reward in Heaven and the homeland are dearer."
| "Hamasistan is filled with brave guys like me, y'know!" |
The 38-year-old furniture salesman says he is not afraid to die for the cause of destroying Israel and forging a Palestinian state on all Israel's territory, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
| Has anybody but me noticed that these guys love toting guns around and waving them and having gun sex, but that they seldom manage to even wound an actual Zionist aggressor? |
To Israel and its allies, Abu Mohammed and his comrades are Jew-hating terrorists. But Abu Mohammed sees himself on a mission from God to rescue his people from 60 years of misery as refugees since the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948.
| Yeah, yeah. So'd Himmler and so'd Heydrich. That still left them Jew-hating rat bastard Nazis, didn't it? |
Though that conviction may, in some, mingle with bravado and self-interest, it does make Hamas an enemy to be reckoned with, for all that Israel's hi-tech army easily outguns their rifles, home-made rockets and, if they choose, their suicide bomb belts.
| Owning a gun doesn't make you a real soldier, no matter how fearsomely you grimace. |
After five days of air strikes and ground assaults that it said aimed to halt Hamas rocket fire, Israel pulled out its troops on Monday after appeals from the United States that followed at international outcry at the dozens of civilians among over 100 dead.
| I didn't cry out. Did you? |
BROKEN HAND
Abu Mohammed survived, though he broke a bone in his hand diving for cover.
| ... and he had to change his pants six or seven time. |
The rocket fire resumed and Hamas and its fellow Islamist allies vowed to battle on, despite losing close to 60 fighters. Estimates vary but there may be 20,000 or more Abu Mohammeds left to continue the war in Gaza alone.
| I guess the Zionist aggressors will just have to kill each and every one. No doubt they'll feel really bad afterwards. And the international outcry will be pretty awful. |
Islam forbids suicide, but rewards "martyrdom" with glory in this world and paradise in the next.
| Yeah, yeah. He gets to diddle flat-chested 12-year-olds for all eternity. We've heard it all before. Notice they haven't yet presented a witness who's actually seen it being done. |
For the 1.5 million Palestinians in the slums and refugee camps of the Gaza Strip, the question of why one of their compatriots would sacrifice his or her life to kill Israelis needs little soul-searching. "An Islamist fighter has two motives: a religious motive -- God's reward; and a social motive -- appreciation from the people he is defending," explained Fadel Abu Heen, a prominent Gaza psychiatrist. And religion was the stronger motivation for Islamist fighters. "That is what makes them braver and more aggressive fighters than others," he said.
| Vicious and stupid were the words that sprang to my mind, but never mind. I'm not an Arab psychologist. |
Older than most of his fellow combatants, Abu Mohammed said his family had fled to Gaza from a village nearby in 1948. "We have the right to all of Palestine," he said in his three-room, one-storey house in Gaza City. "If we are dead before we can liberate our land, then we did not give up. We have to set an example to our children that weakness is not an excuse for not putting up a fight." |