When you hear such words of intellectual depravity, several questions might pop up in those minds who care to think a little deeper than what media churns us out. Some questions that need to be urgently answered based upon facts and Truth. Few of such will be dealt here:

Q1: Why this kind of terrorism employing human bombs, is practiced by Palestinian Arabs and Muslims in particular?

  This indictment of Palestinians and Muslims is built cleverly by the media, but it is the kind of cleverness that substitutes for facts and logic. Mr. Friedman, for example, opens his indictment by wiping the slate of history clean of the daily, unremitting struggle that Palestinians- men, women and children- have waged over the years against Israeli terror, massacres, executions, expropriations, deportations, house demolitions, sieges, curfews, and myriad new forms of intimidation and humiliation. This long, hard, constant, unflagging and valiant struggle over more than 50 years is equated with the acts of 'suicide' bombers. In the words of Braveheart, this is history written by those who have hanged heroes. On the other hand, 'Suicide' bombers are morbidly fascinating, but that fascination reveals as much about us as it does about them. While Americans ponder the roots of murderous martyrdom, searching for explanations that fit within their notions of Third World psychology and religion, the Palestinians seem less interested in spiritual inspiration than in practical military innovation. 

Q2: But it’s also a fact that Palestinians have adopted suicide bombing as a strategic choice, not out of desperation. There are a lot of people in the world who are desperate, yet they have not gone around strapping dynamite to themselves.

   Surely, you must have heard of Samson, Guy Fawkes, the Kamikaze pilots, the Hizbullah and the Tamil Tigers: since almost everyone else has. The Palestinians can scarcely be credited with inventing this "new form of warfare." But there is another way of posing the question that would shift the onus to the Israelis. A quick glance at the recent history of settler colonialism reveals that there have been many episodes, both long and short, of occupation and resistance to occupation, but it is not too often that the oppressed have employed 'suicide' bombing against their occupiers. Is it mere happenstance, then, that every time the Israelis occupy another people - whether it is Southern Lebanon, Gaza and West Bank - they have had to face 'suicide' bombers? Might the fault lie in the occupiers, and not the occupied? 

On the other hand, it would appear that the deployment of 'suicide' bombers was a strategic choice made by Japan when the odds against them appeared to be mounting. It was a choice they implemented massively, mobilizing tens of thousands to launch 'suicide' missions using airplanes, torpedoes, mines and small boats. They were also quite effective. Warner and Warner, in The Sacred Warriors, show that the Allies lost 65 naval and merchant ships to these 'suicide' missions, and 370 more were damaged. By comparison, the recent 'suicide' bombings are minor league distractions. At least until February 2000, the Palestinians were not the biggest players even in this minor league. Hamas claimed only 22 'suicide' missions compared to 168 strikes by Tamil separatists in Sri Lanka.

Q3: But what about Ex US President Clinton who offered the Palestinians a peace plan that would have ended their "desperate" occupation, and it’s well known that Mr. Arafat walked away.

   We are back to the canard about the 'generous' peace plan, so perversely rejected by the Palestinian leadership. In return for municipal control over a few Bantustans, dominated by armed settler encampments, the Palestinians were asked to forego their sovereignty, their right of return, the right to defend themselves, control over their borders, and rights to their own water resources. A 'generous' peace plan it was indeed - generous to the Israelis. Is it surprising that the Palestinians are castigated ad infinitum for rejecting this plan? MSNBC has written about the plan that was proposed to Arafat. Read it here for yourself.

Q4: But these Palestinians had a better chance of making their voices heard globally, had they engaged in nonviolent resistance - a la Gandhi - that would have won them an independent Palestine 30 years ago. But, instead, they chose the path of violent resistance. I mean, 'suicide' bombing.

   Do you imply that Israeli occupation had somehow earned the right to expect Gandhian nonviolence from its victims - as if this was part of the divine package which gave them exclusive rights to historic Palestine? One must ask if the Zionists too had chosen this Gandhian alternative to appropriating historic Palestine: if at any time their dreams embraced the Palestinians as associates, equal partners, in return for sanctuary in their country. Instead, all that the Zionist visionaries saw was "a people (themselves) without a land, and a land (Palestine) without a people." The Palestinians did not exist: and if they did, they would be "spirited across the borders" with some small inducement.

These are the mechanics of the media's argument. It does not reject some "desperation" amongst Palestinians, but this is not why they engage in 'suicide' bombings. They do this out of a perversity, "because they actually want to win their independence in blood and fire," and this has led them to adopt "suicide bombing as a strategic choice." I admit, it is hard to feel the enemy's pain - that while the first 'suicide' bombings against Israeli occupation began in 1993, the Palestinians have been going through "blood and fire" since at least the 1930s. What this means is that Palestinians are now engaged in a most dangerous innovation in the strategy of liberation. "A big test is taking place of whether suicide terrorism can succeed as a strategy for liberation." It is truly extraordinary that Mr. Friedman, writing on the op-ed page of the New York Times, can assume that his readers have never heard of the Kamikaze, the Tamil Tigers, or the Hizbullah. There you have an index of the power of NYT.

So why does some people raise this alarm about Palestinians "testing" "a whole new form of warfare," "a new strategy of liberation?" Faced with a second intifada against their deepening control over the West Bank and Gaza - an intifada that was slowly replacing stone-throwing children with guerilla warfare - the Israelis made a strategic choice. On February 6, 2001, the Israelis and their US mentors had let loose Ariel Sharon, convicted by his own courts of personal responsibility for the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, to crush the new intifada. But the Palestinian resolve, tested for 33 years under the occupation of the world's most efficient military machine, refuses to capitulate before yet another round of warfare. The people who should have been "spirited across the borders" by beads and baubles have shown yet again that their spirits will not be cowed: that they will rise to match and neutralize the power of Israeli military.

Q5: But is this working?

The Palestinian resistance - the media calls 'suicide' bombing - "is working." That is what alarms the likes of Sharon. He thinks that Israel now "needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows that terror will not pay." In other words, he wants United States to give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinian resistance. This might mean more Palestinian deaths, more house demolitions, more incarcerations, and may be even deportations on some significant scale. Everything that is necessary to crush the resistance. Yes, the Europeans will make noises - and there will be some noise in the Arab streets. But with solid American backing, none of this should matter. At least, that is Mr. Friedman's fantasy.

Q6: You're out to legitimize all these suicide bombings as a correct form of retaliation, Islamically approved. 

   I have been placing 'suicide' in 'suicide' bombings within quotes. This requires an explanation. The Oxford English dictionary defines a suicide as "one who dies by his own hand." This definition is clearly inadequate. In the absence of a motive, we cannot distinguish between (i) a person who takes his life because he wants to die and (ii) a person who takes his life because this will save her soul - or her honor, her family, her friends, her community, or her country. The first suggests suicide; the latter is ordinarily regarded as a martyr. Judge for yourself then whether the Palestinians are suicides or martyrs.

Although the Jewish tradition considers suicide reprehensible, it admits exceptions. According to the Talmud - Kaplan and Schwartz, A Psychology of Hope - "suicide can be permissible and even preferred" when the alternative is forced apostasy or torture that is beyond endurance. Imaginably, the Palestinians who choose to 'sacrifice' their lives might argue that the pain and indignity of life under Israeli occupation exceeded their capacity for endurance.

Use your imagination again. Consider a different history of Germany and Europe - one without the Second World War, without the Final Solution, without Auschwitz - all because a lone Jewish 'suicide' bomber in 1938 had penetrated the inner chambers of Nazi leadership and blown them to smithereens while also killing herself. Would this 'suicide' bomber - and her likes - also be regarded as a threat to all civilization? What would Mr. Friedman say about her?

Q7: Whatever the Palestinians' aims, this tactic must be condemned by all decent people, only the most bankrupt leadership could allow such a "macabre, self-delusional act of ruin to pass without anguished condemnation.

Yes! While the Israelis have killed far more people than the Palestinians in the recent conflict, they have done so in a civilized manner, while the Palestinian killing has been barbarous. It recalls the dehumanizing of the suicidal, wild-eyed kamikazes, whose barbarous tactics justified the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, while the properly civilized German-Americans required no such special treatment. Not to mention the American fliers who dropped atomic bombs on Japanese cities. Obviously, far more people -- virtually all of them civilians -- died in Hiroshima than from all of the suicide attacks in history, but not even those of us who consider this a war crime think of the bomber pilots as maddened fanatics.

Q8: The fact is that, there is hardly a Muslim or a Palestinian figure who has made clear that suicide bombing has no place in any struggle worth its name. There have been suicide bombings by Muslims in India too, and no Muslim or Islamic nations seem to have condemned it. This fuels the fire. This lack of condemnation had taken a thousand Muslim lives recently in Gujarat, India.

   I am forced to note that few supporters of U.S. military aims have made it clear that, for example, building anti-personnel mines designed to shoot thousands of pellets at chest level that are made of plastic and hence indetectable by x-rays "has no place in any struggle worth its name." 

Few Hindus condemned the burning of missionary Graham Staines and his sons alive inside their car in Orissa by a group of Hindu fanatics, allegedly led by Dara Singh, in Monoharpur, Keonjhar district, on January 22, 1999. Some went ahead and unashamedly accused him of being a pedophile, justifying his murder. In a cruel attempt to portray the murderers as saints, an affiliated Hindutva site has also been commissioned. 

It is in the nature of unjustifiable war and dirty politics, that many of its tactics are disgusting. To suggest that one's opponents' tactics are uniquely vile is the most common, clichéd propaganda, used by virtually all combatants -- but especially those whose moral stance is threatened by the fact that they are doing most of the killing. "Ah yes," one can say, "it is true that we are out-killing them three to one, or maybe ten to one as in the case of recent Gujarat carnage in India, but the deaths we cause are unavoidable collateral damage, while they are specifically targeting innocent bystanders." It can even sound sensible, this idea that intent is more important than results, unless you are the parents or loved ones of the "collaterally damaged."

How do you expect all Muslims to voice their condemnation for the crimes done by an individual or a group of people who belong to their faith? I suggest that a Register be kept in all the police stations of world so that, when a crime is committed by a Muslim, all members of the community should go and sign for condemnation, failing which, they will be accused of passive collaboration and prone to judicial condemnation.

Read also: Suicide Bombers maybe shocking but dying for a cause is not new - Courtesy LA Times