#876 10/15/17 – This Week: ISIS Call for Female Suicide Bombers Hardly ‘Unprecedented’

This Week:  ISIS Call for Female Suicide Bombers Hardly ‘Unprecedented’

The British news source Independent ran an article October 6, “Isis Calls on Women To Fight and Launch Terror Attacks for First Time,” which assessed a recent call by ISIS for women to take up arms and otherwise engage in Jihad as unprecedented for it, but cited other groups’ prior use of female suicide bombers:

“Isis’s predecessor group, al-Qaeda in Iraq, started prolifically using female suicide bombers from 2005 onwards and other groups, including its Nigerian affiliate Boko Haram, have followed suit.”

Unmentioned by Independent was a slightly earlier “militant” group call for female suicide bombers, one targeting Israelis.  How the AP and at least one big-city American paper, the Philly Inquirer (Inq), handled Hamas’ call for female suicide bombers and Israel’s response to it was not a shining moment for American journalism.  The Inq’s Israel obsession has currently been in remission for some time now, but when the next round comes between Israel and Hamas and/or Hezbollah, that remission will be sorely tested.

On January 20, 2004, the Inq ran an AP Israel/Hamas article in the middle [n.b.] of which it reported:

     “Also yesterday, the founder of Hamas said the Islamic group would increasingly recruit female suicide bombers.  Last week, Hamas sent its first female assailant, a 22-year-old woman who blew herself up at the Gaza-Israel crossing and killed four Israeli border guards.  Sheikh Ahmed Yassin said in Gaza that there had not before been a need for women to carry out bombings.  Now, he said, women must step up to fulfill their obligations.  He suggested that male bombers were increasingly being held back by Israeli security measures.”  [emphasis added]

Two months later, in a precise targeted killing, Israel took the Right Honourable Gentleman out.   On two consecutive days that week, the Inq’s editorial page blasted Israel.

***  On Tuesday, 3/23/04, the Inq ran an across-the-top-of-the-page op-ed page banner headline shrieking “Did Peace Die Along With Sheikh Yassin?”  [This media watch wanted to know:  “Did Medical Ethics Die With Mengele?”]

***  The next day, Wednesday, 3/24/04, the Inq ran a house-cartoonist Tony Auth editorial page cartoon depicting Israel strangling the Peace Dove.  Our media watch that week, #169, led with an open letter to Mr. Auth.  He did not deign to reply.

The mainstream media’s two lines of attack against the Jewish homeland of Israel are

[1]  delegitimizing the Jewish homeland claim to the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, most vociferously but not exclusively to Judea, Samaria and historic Jerusalem (“the Israeli-occupied West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem), where Jews are “settlement settlers” and Arabs “neighborhood, town and village residents”; and

[2]  derogating Israel’s self-defense of its citizens by, e.g., characterizing Israel’s targeted-killing of a caller for female suicide bombers because Israel was stopping the male ones as Israel killing the peace process and Israel strangling the peace dove.

I’m old enough to remember what many Americans (largely historically incorrectly) said, derisively, after World War II of the Jews:  “They went like sheep to the slaughter.”  In today’s world, we do not enhance respect for ourselves, our community or our homeland by passively averting our eyes from derision of the Jewish homeland in the mainstream media.  Leftists love to quote, perhaps even unaware of the source, the second and third things Hillel said – “But if I am for myself only…. And if not now, when?” – but what he said first was “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”  First things, first.