Killing Children for Islam?

The use of teens and children - one as young as eleven - for suicide bombings has grown in recent years, and that is raising concern in many quarters. When combined with the fact that Palestinian children are being encouraged to go into the streets to fight the Israeli army, the question is raised: do Palestinian parents not love their children?

Michel Coren writes in the Toronto Sun:

I should think most of them do. But I have to be candid: many of them don't. We can't just rely on tired old relativism when we look at all this. Nobody who loves his or her child will send that little being out as a suicide bomber. Nobody who loves their children will line them up in front of tanks. The natural instinct of a loving parent is to hide the children. Armed struggle and resistance I can understand, even if I do not approve. This, though, is something different. I've seen it myself. Mothers screaming for their tiny offspring to come out of the house, stand in front of Israeli patrols and throw stones at soldiers.

Do not, please, tell me they have no option. There are legions of young Palestinian men willing to kill Israelis. It's just that children can sometimes be undetected. And are easily convinced of the delights of paradise in the world to come when, I quote, "Zionist skulls, blood and limbs fly against the walls." ... There is a virus at work. For the sake of the good, law-abiding Muslims of the world -- the majority -- we cannot pretend any longer it's about anything other than what it is: a religion gone mad and gone bad.

This sounds remarkably like President Bush's comments that such people "have no sense of guilt... have no soul ... have no conscience," and it would be just as wrong, too. The fact that their religious beliefs motivate them to do something that you, I, or Coren cannot imagine doing does not mean that they have on conscience or that they don't love their children. If anything, it might mean that we don't yet have a firm understanding of those religious beliefs and religious motivations.

Part of the problem may be that so many in the West tend to regard religion as a positive force, but the truth is that religion can motivate people to do good as well as evil. Here we can find religion as a very negative motivation, lending some justification to Coren's comment that we are dealing with a religion "gone mad and gone bad," at least in the cases of some individuals.

Children shouldn't be used as canon fodder for war, but we shouldn't pretend that this is something unique to Islam. Would Coren go so far as to say that the Christian parents of the kids who went on the Children's Crusade didn't love their children? Young people have been on the front lines of wars of desperation since the beginning of recorded history. They have just as much at stake when it comes to the survival of their community as any adult. Children standing up to tanks isn't a sign that their parents don't love them. It might be a sign of desperation and it might be a sign of a religion being seriously twisted.

Read More:

• Recent Books on Islam
• Islam
• What is Jihad?
• Islam, Violence, and Terrorism
• Islamic Extremists
• War on Terrorism