Re: Psychotic fantic ninja says she wanted to die!
Okay visited my neighbourhood libray this morning and below are the specifics of the above mentioned article:
**Published in May 14th 2007 issue of Time Magazine **
Volume 169
No. 20
**Artcles appears on Page 48-49-50 in the ‘World’ section. Article is titled “Moms and Martyrs” By Tim MCGirk (Jerusalem) with reporting by Jamil **
Hamad/Ramallah and Aaron J.Kline/Tel Aviv
Thanks to the hard copy, I was able to locate the article Online:
In late March, a macabre music video appeared on a television show for Palestinian children. “Duha,” 4, as pale as a porcelain doll, is sitting on a bed, watching her mom dress before leaving home. “Mommy, what are you carrying in your arms instead of me?” the girl sings. The next day, Duha gets the answer from the evening news. It turns out her mother was carrying explosives and had blown herself up, killing four Israelis. The final scene shows the girl wistfully rummaging through her dead mother’s bedside table. She finds a hidden stick of dynamite and picks it up. The implicit message is that someday Duha will follow her mother into blazing martyrdom.
Abhorrent as such images might seem, the story behind them is even more wrenching. Aired on a TV channel run by the Islamic militants of Hamas, the two-minute re-enactment was based on the life of Reem Riyashi, 22, a Palestinian mother of two who blew herself up in a suicide attack against Israeli soldiers at a Gaza border crossing in January 2004. Riyashi is hailed as a courageous resistance fighter among Palestinians throughout Gaza and the West Bank, but the truth about what drove her to such a terrible act is much more complex. Palestinians in Gaza and Israeli internal-security experts who studied the background of her case say Riyashi’s husband had discovered that she was having an affair with a senior Hamas commander. Among conservative Palestinians, as in other parts of the Islamic world, an adulterous woman is often punished with death. Riyashi was given a second option: she could become a martyr. In a video statement released hours before her death, Riyashi, garbed in a militaristic uniform and holding a semiautomatic rifle, sounds tough. “I have always wished to knock at the door of heaven carrying skulls belonging to the sons of Zion,” she says. But the pained expression on her chubby, homely face conveys considerably more ambivalence about the idea of annihilating herself to kill Israelis and restore her family’s “honor.”
For the entire artiicle, here is the link:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1617542,00.html
