Suffer the little children: the burden of God

Just when I thought I had a full grasp of the moral depravity that is suicide bombing, another level of horror is revealed. Al Qaeda’s preferred target group for recruiting suicide bomber is—orphans.

As one Pakistani political activist writes:

We have observed that most of the suicides bombers are orphans who are less than 17 years old. These vulnerable children are being used as the main tool for terrorism.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi Interior Ministry has announced that:

Al-Qaeda has over the past two years used 24 children to carry out suicide bombings in Iraq, the director of military operations for the Interior Ministry, Abdelaziz Mohammed Jasim, told pan-Arab daily al-Sharq al-Awsat.

In Somalia, a 13 year old orphan reports on how he was recruited to be a suicide bomber.

Adoption vacuum
Sharia increases the opportunity for jihadis to recruit orphans because it has usually been interpreted to bar adoptions (though a form of guardianship, or khalat, is permitted). Without adoption as an alternative in most Muslim countries, there is a larger pool of vulnerable recruitment targets in orphanages for al Qaeda and its ilk to recruit as self-activating bombs.

It is not surprising that Sharia should be resistant to adoption. Sharia arose in a society where lineage was crucial: the role of daughters was to breed sons for the lineage (hence the propensity for cousin marriage, so they “breed in”). If there is no living parent, a child’s status as “asset” for the lineage is much weakened. And permitting adoption would open up the risk that they become “assets” to another lineage. (As ever, Philip Carl Salzman’s analysis is a necessary starting point for understanding the social dynamics of Islam’s home region.)

There is a push to re-interpret Sharia to permit adoption, part of the general tension between Islam and modernity which has done so much to shape the contemporary jihadi outlook. (Which is not to say that jihadis are merely some modern phenomenon; it has been a recurring feature of Islam that it produces violent “purification” movements—after all, what was the Prophet himself after he took over Medina if not the leader of a violent religious purification movement?)

Use of orphans as a potential political asset is not unique to al-Qaeda. It was widely rumoured that the Romanian Ceaușescu tyranny sought to recruit orphans as loyal secret police operatives. Though not strictly orphans, the Kim dynasty that owns North Korea uses its illegitimate progeny in a similar fashion.

To use orphans as suicidal military assets is, however, rather more distinctively a jihadi activity. Iran used children en masse during its war with Iraq (which makes the regime’s current public angst about plummeting fertility grimly ironic). Child fighters have been a feature in Africa’s horrors and the Tamil Tigers used both child fighters and suicide bombers. But to specifically target orphans for recruitment—indeed, as your preferred source of suicide-bombers—seems a new, vile twist.

But we come back to the point about lineage. Orphans are cut off from family: this makes them both more vulnerable to recruitment and means they come with fewer entanglements. Being no lineage’s “asset”, their loss has fewer social resonances.

Loving death
Of course, part of the horror of using orphans is precisely their vulnerability. The Somali lad telling of how his jihadi recruiter/mentor offered him purpose and love missing from his life is repellent reading. The horror from so using children comes from the violation of innocence and the sense of life thrown away so early. But that assumes one loves and reveres life. This is not a feature of the jihadis.

[Read the rest at Skepticlawyer or at Critical Thinking Applied.]

Son of Hamas (1)

Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue and Unthinkable Choices by Mosab Hassan Yousef is a true story that is much more outlandish than any Hollywood scriptwriter would be allowed to get away with. The eldest son of one of the founders of Hamas (Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah: Islamic Resistance Movement) works for Israeli security (Shin Bet) and converts to Christianity.

His story starts with the young Yousef being stopped at an Israeli checkpoint, arrested, taken to an Israeli prison and beaten: Israelis being horrid to Palestinians, a familiar motif.

We then move to the story of his grandfather, Sheikh Yousef Dawood, iman of the village of Al-Jainya (population about 400) in Jordanian-ruled, Israeli-occupied West Bank and Mosab’s father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, the favourite son who followed his own father, Sheik Hassan, into being an Islamic cleric. As Mosab explains, being a religious leader in Islam is a very broad and authoritative social role:

Because values and traditions have always meant more to the Aranb people than government constitutions and courts, men like my grandfather often became the highest level of authority. Especially in areas where secular leaders were weak or corrupt, the word of a religious leader was considered law (p.7).

Mosab’s father was assigned to a mosque in the city of Ramallah, where religious observance was very lax. He worked hard, with limited success, to build up the mosque. Sheik Hassan then sent his son to Jordan, for more advanced Islamic study (Pp5-8).

Mosab then takes us through the history of the Muslim Brotherhood; its founding by Hassan al-Banna, its struggles with the Egyptian monarchy, its involvement in Nasser’s coup and its suppression by Nasser. We get a sense of the power and effectiveness of the organisation based on the side of Islam that cares for widows, orphans and the poor, that engages in welfare and facilitates education as well as that side which leads to jihad (Pp9-11). Mosab’s father was trained in Jordan by the Muslim Brotherhood, energised and engaged by the positive side of Islam. Mosab doubts that his father has ever allowed himself to see the other side of Islam:

Islamic life is like a ladder, with prayer and praising Allah as the bottom rung. The higher rungs represent helping the poor and needy, establishing schools, and supporting charities. The highest rung is jihad (Pp11-12).

Muslims vary where they are on the ladder:

Traditional Muslims stand at the food of the ladder, living in guilt for not really practising Islam. At the top are fundamentalists, the ones you see in the news killing women and children for the glory of the god of the Qur’an. Moderates are somewhere in between.
A moderate Muslim is actually more dangerous than a fundamentalist, however, because he appears to be harmless, and you can never tell when he has taken that next step towards the top. Most suicide bombers began as moderates (p.12).

Mosab never felt able to talk to his father about where what he had sought had led, such not being done in his culture.

Then it is on to 1977-1987, when Mosab’s father was at the forefront of trying to breathe life into the stagnated Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. Mosab’s father married the sister of one of the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, who had come to Palestine with Mosab’s father. Mosab was born, the first of several children. We are introduced to the tragedy of permanent refugee camps: places not built to function properly because they are only “temporary”—physical inadequacy creating social dysfunction breeding pathological, grievance politics. Consider Al-Amari covering about 22 acres, one of 19 West Bank camps:

By 1957, its weathered tents have been replaced by wall-to-wall, back-to-back concrete houses. Streets were the width of a car, their gutters flowing with raw sewage like rivers of sludge. The camp was overcrowded; the water undrinkable. One lone tree stood at the center of the camp. The refugees depended on the United Nations for everything—housing, food, clothing, medical care, and education (Pp13-14).

Reading Son of Hamas, it becomes clear that one of the fundamental failures of Israeli policy has been failing to provide avenues for Palestinians to develop aspirations beyond the politics of grievance. (That UN, Arab and EU policy have all conspired to do the same is true, but beside the point—Israel bears the consequences far more than any of them.)

Mosab’s father, living simply on a limited income, was successful in reinvigorating the local mosque. In 1987, he took a second job teaching Muslim students in a private West Bank Christian school. His wife raised their six children (four sons, two daughters). Mosab briefly tells the story of his upbringing, raised in love, admiring his father greatly, the enormous local cemetery looming over his neighbourhood (Pp13-18).

Then it is back to the Muslim Brotherhood. It having expanded to include many educated and professional folk, a dispute erupted between the Gazan and the West Bank leaders, the former wanting to take a stand against Israeli occupation the latter not wanting to repeat the mistakes of the Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria where attempted coups had led to great repression. In 1986, a secret meeting in Hebron of seven people, including Mosab’s father, founded HAMAS, deciding to take the next step of civil disobedience. Mosab describes this as his father taking a few more steps up the ladder of Islam (Pp18-20).

Hamas was looking for a pretext to start an uprising. It came in typical Middle Eastern style, via a tragic misunderstanding. An Israeli was stabbed to death, four Palestinians died in a traffic accident, the rumour spread that they were killed in retaliation and the First Intifada was sparked off (p.21).

Mosab’s father is arrested by the Israelis and Mosab flirts with becoming a stone-throwing adolescent. The detention of Hamas leaders fails to suppress the Intifada, which becomes more violent: Palestine, and particularly Gaza, being a land with many grievances but a dearth of alternative aspirations. (And some of the resistance tactics seem to be designed to increase grievances and frustrate alternative aspirations, such as school strikes.)

Mosab contrasts the PLO, (“even as a young boy, I saw the PLO as corrupt and self-serving” [.p33]) and Hamas, which was rising in power and influence. The arrest of Mosab’s father meant his family lost the extra income he earned teaching Muslim students at a Christian school; the family struggled on little income with little or no support. His father was released, and they used Mosab mother’s dowry gold to buy a house: his father was to be continually re-arrested and released, putting the family under great strain. The Intifada became increasingly violent, as younger, more radical activists demanded blood for those (largely teenagers) killed by Israeli soldiers: Israel now faced attacks from within its own borders (Pp34ff).

The kidnapping and murder of an Israeli border policeman led to a massive Israeli crackdown on Hamas, which saw Mosab’s father deported to Lebanon. Mosab’s family were not cut off from Mosab’s father, except for occasional glimpses on news bulletins. The deportation led to Hamas and Hezbollah forging links (p.51). Then came the profound shock and surprise of the Oslo Accords, which polls found were strongly supported by Palestinians, but not Mosab’s father, who trusted neither the PLO nor the Israelis (p.52).

Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of 29 worshippers in a Hebron mosque while wearing his IDF uniform set off further cries for vengeance and was followed by the first official suicide bombing (Pp53-4). Arafat and the PLO made a pragmatic argument for the Oslo Accords as the best deal available in adverse circumstances: Hamas remained opposed (Pp55-6).

Mosab explains that Hamas was not an organisation in the conventional sense, “it was a ghost, an idea”. Gaoling, or even killing, its leaders did nothing to stop its growth. While the PLO was ultimately a nationalist body, seeking a national solution:

Hamas, on the other hand, Islamized the Palestinian problem, making it a religious problem. And this problem could be resolved only with a religious solution, which meant that it could never be resolved because we believed that the land belonged to Allah. End of discussion. Thus for Hamas, the ultimate problem was not Israel’s policies. It was the nation-state Israel’s very existence (p.58).

Mosab asked his father about a suicide bombing that had killed many civilians, including women and children. His father replied with a story about being unable to kill an insect. Suicide bombing was not something he would do himself, but he could rationalise somebody else doing it. “At that moment, my view of my father grew much more complicated” (p.59).

The assassination of Rabin, Arafat’s negotiation partner, led to the PLO repressing Hamas, imprisoning many of its leader and activists—including Mosab’s father in Arafat’s compound. Hating Israel and secular Palestinians, Mosab moved to trying to get guns. The classmate involved with him was stupid enough to talk about the guns (which turned out not to work) on the phone. He and Mosab were both arrested (Pp61ff).

In prison Mosab was tortured (fairly lightly, by the grim standards of the Middle East). Then he is interrogated, politely and respectfully, over a decent meal, by Loai, the Shin Bet captain for his area, before being moved into solitary confinement for days. Loai offers him the opportunity to work for Shin Bet, which Mosab accepts as making the best of a bad situation. Mosab continues to be imprisoned, ending up in Megiddo prison, dominated by Hamas (the various Palestinian organisations police their own inmates). Mosab’s story becomes a prison story, detailing the fetid prison atmosphere of fear and suspicion. He comes the clerk for the internal Hamas files on inmates, attempting to identify collaborators. Files that were highly pornographic, detailing bizarre sexual confessions (Pp98-9). He sees Islam at its most unattractive:

… the Muslims I saw in Megiddo bore no resemblance to my father. They judged people as if they thought they were greater than Allah himself. They were mean and petty, blocking a television screen to prevent us seeing a bareheaded actress. They were bigots and hypocrites, torturing those who got too many red points—though only the weakest, most vulnerable people seem to accumulate those points. Prisoners who were well connected walked with immunity (p.106).

Mosab’s father was released from Palestinian Authority detention, to be imprisoned by the Israelis in Megiddo prison. Mosab is sentenced and released at the end of his term.

Two months later, he is contacted by Loai. In various highly secure safe houses, he is simply engaged in conversation about life in general. He is steadily trained, experiencing it as a process of Shin Bet “building him up”, paid some money and then given his first assignment: go to university and get his bachelor’s degree. The Shin Bet staff are polite and respectful, including of his religion: he finds the person Loai most resembles is his father. Mosab’s worldview is profoundly shaken (Pp113ff).

Then, literally at Suleiman the Magnificent’s Damascus Gate in Jerusalem (where Saul of Tarsus had his famous visionary encounter), Mosab encounters an Arabic-speaking Brit who gets him interested in a Bible study group. The New Testament in Arabic becomes his reading companion, along with attendance at the study group and church services. The contrast between the morality of the Gospels, and the religious engagement of his new Christian friends, with his experience of Islam is a revelation that steadily eats away at him over the next few years (Pp119ff).


This review is concluded in my next post.

The conundrum of terrorism

This extends a comment I made here and another I made here.

In her post, Dr J was essentially supporting the position of, for example, the Reagan Administration (pdf). In Paul Bremer's words:


Another important measure we have developed in our overall strategy is applying the rule of law to terrorists. Terrorists are criminals. They commit criminal actions like murder, kidnapping, and arson, and countries have laws to punish criminals. So a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are -- criminals -- and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against them.


In other words, to not become what we are fighting.


That terrorists use criminal means is obvious. That they do not have conventional criminal ends (or not only conventional criminal ends) is also obvious. They are certainly not entitled to be treated as combatants who have signed the Geneva Conventions, because clearly they have not. They are waging a form of war, but do not acknowledge (or bind themselves by) any of the laws of war. They place themselves outside those limits and so, in some important sense, place themselves outside those protections.



Hence I am very reluctant to support anything that gives them a status they absolutely have not earned nor are entitled to. Certainly, giving them the status of mere criminals strips them of their self-flattering pretensions. And it minimises the chances of us becoming that which we fight.



There is the issue of effectiveness: does treating them as criminals work well enough? This seems especially urgent given the destructive capacities of modern technology.

But there is also the point about why societies have warrior codes: to differentiate the warrior from the murderer. To not corrupt our own processes and our own protectors is why the common law has opposed torture since medieval times, for example.



Treating the captured terrorists as criminals seems not very problematic if they committed crimes within one's own jurisdiction. But what about those whose evil falls elsewhere? Does it become a simple matter of extradition? But what if there are real problems with that?



It is a sign of how tangled this all is that how to respond to terrorism the mixed responses it does.

Michael J Totten’s recent article in Commentary takes the killing of Hamas’ military head as the sort of thing that should be done. This seems to be the general burden of those commenting at his blog. The argument seems to boil down to Hamas is so obnoxious it deserves anything it gets and it is really, really preferable no one else gets hurt on the way through.

We have warrior codes to distinguish soldiers from murderers. But a standard part of such codes is to restrict killing to those engaged in the heat of battle. (Part of which is the use of uniforms: one of the many ways terrorism evades civilising restrictions.)

The killing in Dubai is murder in the legal code of Dubai and was clearly not in the heat of battle. But if you capture someone like Mahmud al-Mabhuh then you are actually increasing the danger to your own citizens, as his release becomes a reason to snatch people able to be used as levers. (See previous point about terrorism evading civilising restrictions.)

But this is part of the calculus of terrorism: to push their opponents into actions that recoil on them. There are genuine conundrums here.

Though, likely, the first time a city becomes the victim of nuclear terrorism, terrorists will be declared hostis humani generis and subject to summary execution, like pirates on the high seas in more robust days.

This seems to be where Totten et al seem to be effectively at. The conundrum of terrorism is dealing morally with people who are at war with the restrictions of morality magnified by the destructive potential of modern technology.