In the March issue of The Atlantic, the Editor’s Note column by James Bennet tells about his encounters with Hamas leader Nizar Rayyan at Rayyan’s home in Gaza. Bennet notes that Rayyan was an educated man, having “written his master’s thesis on martyrdom, before turning to the future of Islam for his doctorate.” Rayyan had also sent one of his own sons to be a martyr in an attack in Israel, and was looking forward to sending more. With three wives and looking for a fourth, apparently he wanted to keep the supply of potential martyrs coming. To me, Bennet takes a particularly odd approach to this subject matter, but hey, that’s just me:

That day at the hotel, he wore a dark-green suit, white shirt, and blue-and-gold tie held in place by a silver clip. We drank juice, I think—he had an affectation of delicately sticking out one pinkie when he held a glass in his big hand—as he patiently tried to explain the Koranic basis for suicide killing. “I’m worried you don’t understand,” he said.

Rayyan said that he missed the son who had died attacking the settlement (he was 16), but that he planned to push another son to conduct an attack of his own. “It’s our home,” he said. “It’s more dear to me than my kids.” He was then looking to add a fourth wife—“I love women,” he told me with a smile—with a goal of eventually having 50 children. His bigoted worldview, and his rich historical imagination, gave him a kind of serenity. “When Muslims ruled the world, we treated everyone as we treat ourselves,” he said. To him, Israel was a hammer the Americans used to fragment Muslim society. Matter-of-factly, he told me once that the Palestinians might have to sacrifice half the rising generation to drive the Israelis out and rule all Palestine again.

In January, the Israelis dropped a bomb smack on top of that very same house, killing Rayyan, his wives and many of his children, plus others. The New York Post describes the Israeli assust:

A 1-ton Israeli bomb took out a fanatical Hamas chieftain yesterday, a day after he vowed to launch terrorist rockets “even deeper” into Israel.

Nizar Rayyan, 49, was the highest-ranking terrorist killed by Israel in four years and the first of Hamas’ five senior officials to die in the six-day Gaza Strip offensive.

He was holed up in a four-story building in Jabaliya when the blast killed him along with all four of his wives, nine of his children and two others, Palestinian sources said.

Rayyan had repeatedly called for suicide-bomb attacks inside Israel, and sent his own son to carry out a suicide bombing in 2001 that killed two Israelis. He was both a military commander and the spiritual leader of Hamas’ brutal military wing.

So, back to The Atlantic. For Bennet, this “fanatical Hamas chieftain” was an impeccably dresses man that drank juice with pinkie extended, a “courtly” cosmopolitan Muslim that would actually shake the hand of Bennet’s pregnant wife. I guess to his credit Bennet also writes “I always suspected he was one of Hamas’s deadlier manipulators of the young.” He have a saying back at the ranch — no sh_t, Sherlock!

It’s in his last ‘graph that he telegraphs his sense of moral equivalency between Hamas and Israel.

He wound up sac­ri­ficing most of his own family. His four wives and nine of his children died in the January bombing, buried in the rubble of the house he insisted wasn’t their real home. Several of his neighbors died, too. Outside of a prison, you are unlikely ever to meet someone more trapped than a Gazan refugee—by leaders like Rayyan, by Israel, by a fatal obsession with the past. [Emph. mine]

Yeah, right. Israel just wants to have to keep on killing Palestinians for no good reason but they are Palestinians. Never mind those little things like rocket attacks and suicide bombings. Never mind that Hamas states in its charter that Israel has no right to exist and must be destroyed. Never mind that “courtly” “cosmopolitan” “sophists” like Nizar Rayyan teach their children to love death and to hate Israel and the West.

Nope, it’s all the same — to those like Bennet and like-minded company.

Technorati Tags: Hamas chieftain, Nizar Rayyan

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