Plumbing The Depths
     Of Political Cynicism      

           On Wednesday, April 24^th, three 14-year-old Palestinian boys armed with reasonably sophisticated pipe bombs came home from school, told their parents they were going out to be with friends, and then joined together to attack an Israeli settlement.

            The boys were shot dead before they could wreak the death and havoc they hoped to deliver to the Israelis. But they achieved something different, something unexpected; they created a groundswell of revulsion among Palestinians.

            It was as if finally the average Palestinian had enough, and was willing to risk saying so! The reverberation was so quick and so strong that Hamas, the organization that originated suicide murders in the Middle East, decried the deaths. Hamas spokesmen called the deaths “a national tragedy” and urged Moslem preachers to dissuade children from considering such actions.

Such a reaction from Hamas might at first blush seem hopeful to reasonable people in other parts of the globe, but to think that the dedicated hate mongers who run Hamas suddenly had an attack of conscience would be ingenuous in the extreme. It would in fact play into their facile hopes and plans.

 According to Deborah Blachor, reporting for The New York Daily News out of Jerusalem, “Palestinian and Israeli sources said the dead boys were probably Hamas recruits – and that faced with public outrage, the militants are suddenly reluctant to take credit for the terrorism they sowed.”

If there is anything positive that might come out of the tragic death of these three adolescent boys - who at that critical juncture between childhood and adulthood were cynically wooed with a false sense of heroism and adventure by cold-hearted partisans - it is the illustration of the depth of cynicism and depravity among the Palestinians who run Hamas and all other such terrorist organizations.

The mother of Youssef Zaquot, after reading her son’s ‘martyr note’ asking her to

“be happy with me. I ask you to pray to God to make my martyrdom a success,” seemed to ignore the reality that what happened was a result of her son’s actions and those that influenced him. Instead she declared that the Israeli soldiers who killed her son were to blame.             Ms. Blachor reports that Mrs. Zaquot declared: “They killed my boy. Israel has left all Palestinians, including children, with no choice but to die.”

How the cynical Hamas leaders must rejoice at such words. They are exonerated from their crimes by the very people, their own people, that they have victimized.

This is the true tragedy. That the fully cynical leaders of the Palestinians have managed to manipulate their people to such a degree that children think it is heroic to die while killing others, and that parents in their grief try to find solace in supporting such absurd concepts of warfare. The cynicism of the Hamas leaders and others of their ilk knows no bounds, and the only hopeful aspect of this situation is the general outcry from the average Palestinians over the death of these three boys.

Hopefully, that outcry from the average Palestinian won’t be lost or sublimated under the fear of reprisal by the totalitarian thugs of Hamas. It is such fear of reprisal that creates the silence which so often passes for political cohesiveness among the Palestinians.