Seven years ago, in my book America Alone, I noted the Hamas landslide in the 2006 Palestinian elections:
Among the incoming legislators was Mariam Farahat, a mother of three, elected in Gaza. She used to be a mother of six but three of her sons self-detonated on suicide missions against Israel. She’s a household name to Palestinians, known as Um Nidal – Mother of the Struggle – and, at the rate she’s getting through her kids, the Struggle’s all she’ll be Mother of. She’s famous for a Hamas recruitment video in which she shows her 17-year old son how to kill Israelis and then tells him not to come back. It’s the Hamas version of 42nd Street: You’re going out there a youngster but you’ve got to come back in small pieces.
“Um Nidal” passed away yesterday. Unusually for a member of the Farahat family, she expired not from firing up the old suicide belt and with body parts of dead Jews raining down on her, but, rather more prosaically, from multiple organ failure. One trusts that, reunited with mom in Paradise, her late sons won’t hold it against her. Suicide for Allah “makes me happy”, she famously declared. “Hepatitis for Allah” doesn’t have quite the same ring.
Nevertheless, as this headline puts it, “Thousands participate in funeral of the Khansa of Palestine’ Umm Nidal Farahat“. Thousands. For a woman whose sole contribution to Palestinian “society” is a mound of dead sons.
“This is who the Palestinian people are, this is what they believe,” I wrote in my book. “After 60 years as UN ‘refugees’, they’re now so inured they’re electing candidates on the basis of child sacrifice.”