Raising Child Homicide Bombers in Pakistan, Our Ally

A girl listens to speeches during a gathering at the radical Red Mosque in Islamabad July 9, 2008. About 2,000 jihad supporting Muslim women gathered at the Red Mosque in the Pakistani capital on Wednesday and vowed to raise their children for holy war, days after a suicide bomber killed 18 people following a similar rally. The words on the child’s headband reads, “There is no God but Allah.”

But of course, while openly proclaiming “We should prepare our children and men for jihad,” and “Islam…grows more after martyrs [i.e., homicide bombers] shed their blood,” the daughter of  the Pakistani jihadist Red Mosque cleric Abdul Aziz (who was captured during the siege last year trying to slip through a cordon dressed in a woman’s burqa) opined with predictable Islamic cognitive dissonance, “We are not terrorists. Islam does not teach terrorism.”

Unfortunately, teaching jihad hatred to Muslim children has a long and ignoble heritage in Islamic societies. Here are the excerpts from a mid 19th century Arabic text, containing a typical jihad-inciting curse on non-Muslims, recited daily by Muslim schoolchildren in Egypt:

“I seek refuge with God from Satan the accursed. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. O God, aid El-Islam, and exalt the word of truth, and the faith, by the preservation of thy servant and the son of thy servant, the Sultan of the two continents (Europe and Asia), and the Khakan (Emperor or monarch) of the two seas [the Mediterranean and Black Seas], the Sultan, son of the Sultan (Mahmood) Khan (the reigning Sultan when this prayer was composed). O God, assist him, and assist his armies, and all the forces of the Muslims: O Lord of the beings of the whole world. O God, destroy the infidels and polytheists, thine enemies, the enemies of the religion. O God, make their children orphans, and defile their abodes, and cause their feet to slip, and give them and their families, and their households and their women and their children and their relations by marriage and their brothers and their friends and their possessions and their race and their wealth and their lands as booty to the Muslims: O Lord of the beings of the whole world.”(Emphasis added.)

Read the depressingly familiar contemporary narrative which even Reuters is unable to bowdlerize: “Women at Pakistan’s Red Mosque vow babies for jihad”