11/19/05: Girl's Grieving Palestinian Mother Was Not Celebrating Her Martyrdom - Kathy Walsh
Girl's Grieving Palestinian Mother Was Not Celebrating Her Martyrdom
The Capital Times :: EDITORIAL :: 11A
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Dear Editor:
In your article on the effort to get the UW to drop its investments in compainies supplying war materials to Israel, Professor Ken Goldstein is quoted as saying, "When a Palestinian woman loves her child, and does not encourage 14- 15- and 16-year-olds to strap bombs onto their body and blow up Israeli 3-, 4- and 5-year olds at a pizzeria, then we'll have a two-state solution."
I was in Rafah (a city in the Gaza strip) when a 10-year-old girl was killed by Israeli sniper fire while standing in line outside her school. I saw the mother. She was beyond herself in grief. Some may consider her child a martyr, but her mother was NOT celebrating her martyrdom, but grieving her death, as I know Jewish mothers and Christian mothers and even atheist mothers like myself would do. And I don't think it was because her daughter was killed before she had a chance to be a bomb. The child's name was Norhan, or "light" in Arabic. She was a light extinguished for no reason.
Statistics on who is killing whom can be found at Remember These Children, B'Tselem, or even the Israeli Defense Force Web sites. As of Nov. 9, 123 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians since September 2000. In this same time period, Israelis have killed 704 Palestinian children.
Two Palestinian children have been shot to death by Israeli soldiers since Nov. 1 -- Mohammad Hamdi Abu Salha, 15, of Nablus, and Ahmed Ismail Khatib, 12, of Jenin. Ahmed's father donated his organs to several Israeli children and one Israeli woman. That is just one example of the "hatred" that Palestinians teach their children.
Kathy Walsh Madison