Hamas’ Mother of Killers

Anyone who wonders if the new Hamas government of the Palestinian Authority can be compelled by the West to moderate should look for an answer from Mariam Farhat, or Umm Nidal (mother of Nidal), one of the newly elected members of the Palestinian Legislative Council. In June 2002, her son Muhammad Farhat stormed the Atzmona settlement in Israel, firing indiscriminately, killing five teenagers and wounding twenty others before he himself was killed. When asked by an interviewer if her son had intended to target civilians, Umm Nidal responded: “Muhammad carried out his operation at a military academy. They were all soldiers.”

However, if he had targeted women and children, that would have been fine with his mother. “These are war necessities,” she explained. “They are all occupiers to begin with. Whoever comes from abroad and lives on the land of Palestine is considered an occupier, even if they are women or old people….This is Islamic religious law. I don’t invent anything. I follow Islamic religious law in this….We rely on Islamic religious law when we say there is no prohibition on killing these people.”

Umm Nidal believes all this so deeply that she cried out “Allahu Akbar” when she learned of Muhammad’s murders and his own death; she “prepared boxes of halva and chocolates, and handed them out to his friends.” To those who would reproach her for being heartless, she responded: “My children are the most precious thing in my life. That is why I sacrificed them for a greater cause — for Allah, who is more precious than them. My son is not more precious than his God, he is not more precious than the places holy to Islam, and he is not more precious than his homeland or his Islam.”

Many still cling to hope that Hamas will somehow change. After the elections, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said: “Palestinian people have apparently voted for change, but we believe their aspirations for peace and a peaceful life remain unchanged.” Yet Mariam Farhat was elected; at a Hamas victory rally, one woman exclaimed: “She is a mother to every house, every person.”

Do Palestinians, despite having elected Hamas and Umm Nidal, reject the perspectives and positions represented by her and her party, as so many Western officials would love to believe? Umm Nidal doesn’t think so. “All the Palestinians,” she asserted, “share the same view” that she articulated about the legitimacy of targeting Israeli civilians. “They are not divided. The only ones who disagree and think otherwise are, of course, the foreigners, who have no sympathy for us or for our cause, and who know nothing about us. They are the ones who think that this man has come to kill innocent people….But we, as Muslims, think differently. We are familiar with the Koranic verse: ‘One who attacks you, attack him in like manner.’”

But don’t the Palestinians want peace? Yes, says Umm Nidal, but “the word ‘peace’ does not mean the kind of peace we are experiencing. This peace is, in fact, surrender and a shameful disgrace. Peace means the liberation of all of Palestine, from the [Jordan] to the [Mediterranean] Sea. When this is accomplished — if they want peace, we will be ready. They may live under the banner of the Islamic state. That is the future of Palestine that we are striving towards.”

Striving toward such peace also is Hamas leader Khaled Mash’al, who said this at the Al-Murabit Mosque in Damascus last Friday: “Before Israel dies, it must be humiliated and degraded. Allah willing, before they die, they will experience humiliation and degradation every day….Today they have frail leaders, who don’t even know where our Lord placed them. Allah willing, we will make them lose their eyesight, we will make them lose their brains.”

If world officials think that an electorate that elected Umm Nidal and her party in free and secret balloting is not enthralled with blood, death, and genocidal intransigence, and will somehow join the community of free and rational nations, they have already lost their eyesight, they have already lost their brains.