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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Anna Geifman</title>
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		<title>Who Is Killing Palestinian Children?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/anna-geifman/who-is-killing-palestinian-children/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=who-is-killing-palestinian-children</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jul 2014 04:50:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Anna Geifman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Children]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[terrorization]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236525</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The return of the 12-year-old members of the Hitlerjugend.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/hamas11.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236527" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/hamas11-450x298.jpg" alt="hamas11" width="320" height="212" /></a>Political differences aside, few will disagree that Palestinian children are innocent victims of the on-going hostilities in Gaza. Israel’s air strikes, aimed to defend its citizens from Hamas’ terrorization, resulted in civilian casualties, which included child victims. Yet, none other than Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, are responsible for the general humanitarian crisis there and for scores of killed, wounded, and traumatized children.</p>
<p>Civilian fatalities are inevitable in any war, and thus far there are 230 in Gaza, despite a painstaking—and largely successful&#8211;effort of the Israelis to minimize collateral casualties. There is sufficient documentary evidence to show that Israeli pilots have cancelled scheduled air strikes after having spotted children and other innocents close to sites designated for destruction.[i] On the other hand, since the outbreak of the war, the Hamas government repeatedly ordered citizens to ignore Israel’s warnings to evacuate before the strikes: residents were to remain inside their houses and not to “collaborate with the enemy.”[ii] Hamas punishment for collaborators has always been death,[iii] and many Gazans might have chosen to take a chance with their lives and those of their families rather than to defy terrorists in power.</p>
<p>Palestinians are the prime victims of their oppressive, brutal, criminal, semi-totalitarian administration. They are as afraid of their Hamas leaders as Russians were terrified of the Bolsheviks in their day. To expect to hear a sincere opinion of a Gaza citizen about any current political issue is like waiting for a terrorized captive of Stalin’s regime to express his independent view on Soviet foreign policy. The Israeli soldiers understand that they are forced to fight Hamas among the population which is “held hostage.”[iv]</p>
<p>The analogy holds, except for one central point: whereas the Bolsheviks in 1917 usurped power by force, Hamas won a significant majority in the 2006 elections in the Palestinian Parliament, and since 2007 maintained unilateral control of Gaza. A closer resemblance may therefore be to the Nazis, who had taken over German politics in 1933 as a result of the democratically-held parliamentary elections. Like the Germans, the Palestinians elected their Hamas leaders by a popular vote. Like the Germans in the 1930s and 1940s, they bare responsibility for their government’s aggression and brutality. And, like the Germans at the end of WWII, they suffer—and suffer indeed!&#8211;the consequences of the failed democratic process and its abuse by the extremists. “We are not leading our people to execution,” declared the Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri on Al-Aqsa TV on July 14, 2014, “We are leading them to death… I mean, to confrontation,” he corrected his slip of the tongue.[v] To say that to be led to death the adult Gazans chose is not to blame the victim; tragically, they made this choice also for their children.</p>
<p>Would it be a stretch of the comparison to say that Palestinian children today are like the 12-year-old members of the Hitlerjugend, whom in 1945 the Nazis equipped with hand grenades to blow up Soviet tanks? Time and again Hamas employs minors for suicide acts and other form of terrorist activity, sometimes giving them money or promising to pay their families.[vi] The Hamas uses Gaza schools and kindergartens as missile storages and launching sites; child facilities, as well as hospitals and mosques, protect Hamas fighters from the Israeli fire.[vii] A vivid fifteen-second video depicts the terrorists forcing small boys to serve adults as shields against the Israeli snipers.[viii] Even some Arab sources reveal that the Islamists use “human shields and hide behind them, without mercy for their children . . . in order to tell the public opinion that the Jews intended to kill them.”[ix]</p>
<p>An entire communication network exists in the Hamas-controlled Gaza for the purpose of producing “tragic news events.” Raw footage produces “Pallywood”&#8211;media manufacturing of bloody incidents, testifying of Israel’s intentional targeting of civilians and other “crimes against humanity.”[x] The Zionist agents are accused of spreading food that contains cancer-causing ingredients and of deliberately poisoning air and water. The Israelis are blamed for selling sports shoes that “cause the wearer to become paralyzed” and perfumes that lead to drug addiction, as well as of distributing AIDS, “sexually stimulating drops and chewing gum,” so as to &#8220;weaken and destroy&#8221; Palestinian youth.</p>
<p>Film clips of official TV have been fabricated to show the alleged victims of depleted uranium and nerve gas attacks quivering by convulsions and vomiting. Israelis are said to have performed Nazi-like experiments on Palestinian prisoners: &#8220;Many of the male and female inmates received injections from needles . . . which caused their hair and facial hair to fall out permanently. . . others lost their sanity, or their mental condition is constantly deteriorating. . . and some are suffering from infertility.” Reenacted for the cameras are also scenes of rape by Israeli soldiers.[xi] “We don’t encourage our children to hate the Jews. We just tell them . . . that the Jews killed their families, and they reach the conclusion to hate the Jews on their own,” explains an unsuccessful suicide terrorist, who, although imprisoned, dreams of having children some day—to bring them up as Shahids.[xii]</p>
<p>“What is your most lofty aspiration?” six-year-olds in Hamas attire are asked during a kindergarten graduation ceremony; they are trained to scream in unison: “Death for the sake of Allah!”[xiii] Some kindergarteners are primed enough to envisage their future in detail: “When I will grow up, I want to blow myself up with the Zionists and to kill them in a suicide act on a bus.” [xiv] Preachers tell the youngsters that those who die as martyrs feel no pain and receive rewards in the afterlife; even when a Shahid “turns into torn organs that spread all over, in order to meet Allah, Muhammad, and his friends, it would not be a loss.”[xv]</p>
<p>Privately, Palestinians admit: “We live in a culture of death;”[xvi] indeed, “for the Palestinian people death has become an industry,” boast its official engineers,[xvii] whose special focus is on the very young. Official Hamas eulogies, television broadcasts, naming athletic tournaments after suicide terrorists, monument inaugurations, writing essays and poems in class, as well as religious sermons, have the common denominator of depicting the suicide mission as an act of ultimate virtue.</p>
<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re happy that our school is named after a very well-known Martyr,” who died when a bomb she was preparing to be detonated in a building in Tel Aviv exploded in her hands, students in the Shadia Abu Ghazaleh High School for Girls explain: &#8220;She was a model of the wonderful female Palestinian fighter. We follow her path in this school . . . With her blood she delineated a path for all of Palestine&#8217;s women.&#8221;[xviii] Instruction in terrorism is a segment of a regular military summer camp curriculum, in which professional combatants coach boys and girls and indoctrinate them in hatred and murder.[xix]</p>
<p>Posters in kindergartens scream: “The children are holy martyrs of tomorrow.”[xx] Hamas-run TV produces and broadcasts programs similar to that about Farfur, a Mickey Mouse look-alike, who is beaten to death by an Israeli and becomes a Shahid, joining other glorious martyrs.[xxi] Assaud the Rabbit takes his place on the Al-Aqsa TV in Gaza and promises children to “eat the Jews.” [xxii] In July 2009 the Hamas TV children’s program “Tomorrow Pioneers” aired a special broadcast in which the children of Reem Riyashi were invited to the studio to watch and comment on a video re-enactment of their mother&#8217;s 2004 suicide bombing.[xxiii]</p>
<p>“We have the right to congratulate the Shahids’ families, not to extend condolences and sorrow . . . . “Shame and remorse on whoever refrained from raising his children on Jihad;” [xxiv] this is the official party-line in Gaza. It is highly doubtful that the majority of parents are so brainwashed as to rejoice about their children’s death. Some are openly infuriated that the Jihadist recruiters exploited their children. [xxv] The bereaved father of a young suicide bomber complained in a newspaper interview that ideologists of terror never dispatch their own sons and daughters to death: “Who gave them religious justification to send our children to blow themselves up?” he cried and called the terrorist leaders “snakes.”[xxvi]</p>
<p>However passionately some express in public the officially-required ecstasy on their son’s “wedding day” (euphemism for death mission) privately they mourn the loss and try to keep their other teenagers from engagement in violence.[xxvii] Still, “over time a cult of martyrdom that generated posters, videos, songs, and societal glorification grew up in Palestinian society,” in which children play with toy and real weapons[xxviii] &#8212; a sociocultural context of obligatory veneration of suicide terrorism. “I always longed to be the mother of a Shahid,” declared in an interview Umm Nidal Farhat, a Palestinian woman who had lost two sons to Jihad; “As far as I am concerned, let all my sons be Shahids,” she said; it “is the best thing in this world.” [xxix]</p>
<p>Within the “culture of martyrdom,”[xxx] which Hamas has been constructing, polls show that between 72 and 80 per cent of Palestinian children yearn to die as martyrs; independent psychology research confirms these numbers.[xxxi] “We don’t want this world,” affirms Yussra, an 11-year-old victim of indoctrination-in-death: “We benefit not from this life, but from the Afterlife. . . . Every Palestinian child . . . says, O Lord, I would like to become a <em>shahid</em>.”[xxxii]</p>
<p>“Let’s play the Shahid Game!” Nada, a 7-year-old girl, says to her friends. The children bring an old sheet, spread it on the ground, and then begin to argue who will be the Shahid. Six-year old Fa’iz says: “You were the Shahid yesterday, today it’s my turn! . . . I will be the one to die!”[xxxiii]</p>
<p>Thousands of images inundate the world’s printed media and the Internet to illustrate the devastating results of every Israeli operation in Gaza. It is difficult to find a photograph in which small children would not be the visual centerpiece—striking millions of viewers right in their hearts. When children’s task is to illicit sympathy, they are persecuted, covered with dust and blood, scared, agonizing, and sad. But why is there no image of the “Palestinian resistance” without 14-year-olds throwing stones; or 12-year-olds hanging out among the heavily-armed Hamas fighters; or 10-year-olds watching the Israeli soldiers carry out their mission? Is this a case of terrible neglect or parental inability to prevent their children from going to a very dangerous place, where they are likely to get hurt? Are these children being war-initiated and taking part in an on-site Hamas military training? It could be both, or yet another manifestation of a constructed a murderous culture, in which terrorists refashion children into instruments of death.</p>
<p>On July 16, 2014 Al Jazeera website published an article, “Gaza Child: Three Wars Old.”[xxxiv] Gazan children above the age of six already witnessed three wars with Israel, and they are the lucky survivors, explains the writer, Yasmeen El Khoudary. Along from the Israeli offensive, she outlines a list of circumstances allegedly responsible for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza: “a seemingly everlasting siege,” dire political and economic situation, new Egyptian regime&#8217;s complicity, Arab negativity, and “the Palestinian Authority&#8217;s total detachment and pathetic stance against Israel.”</p>
<p>There is a gaping fallacy in this inventory of fault-finding: it is Hamas which is the prime user of “collective punishment” in Gaza; it is Hamas, which abuses and exploits its own people for the sake of maintaining power; like any and all other dictatorial regimes, it is the real cause of suffering of its people. Truly innocent sacrifices among the Hamas victims are Palestinian children.</p>
<p><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
<p>[i] See, for example, <a href="http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/idf-exposes-hamass-use-of-human-shields">http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/idf-exposes-hamass-use-of-human-shields</a></p>
<p>[ii] See, for example, <a href="http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=1046&amp;fld_id=1046&amp;doc_id=12022">http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=1046&amp;fld_id=1046&amp;doc_id=12022</a>; חמאס לתושבים: לא לשתף פעולה עם &#8220;הקש בגג&#8221; ולהישאר בבתים, <a href="http://m.ynet.co.il/Article.aspx?id=4541047">http://m.ynet.co.il/Article.aspx?id=4541047</a>; Palestinian Media Watch, <a href="http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=12063">http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=12063</a></p>
<p>[iii] For some among numerous examples see <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/world/middleeast/suspected-collaborator-with-israel-executed-in-gaza.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/world/middleeast/suspected-collaborator-with-israel-executed-in-gaza.html</a>, and <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/hamas-kills-suspected-collaborators-israel-gaza-article-1.1205010">http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/hamas-kills-suspected-collaborators-israel-gaza-article-1.1205010</a></p>
<p>[iv] Yoav Zitun, “צה&#8221;ל על הרג הילדים: באזור התבצעה פעילות טרור. אם נפגעו אזרחים מדובר באירוע טרגי”, July 16, 2014, <a href="http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0%2c7340%2cL-4544917%2c00.html">http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0%2c7340%2cL-4544917%2c00.html</a>”</p>
<p>[v] Palestinian Media Watch, <a href="http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=12063">http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=12063</a></p>
<p>[vi] For an example of a 14-year old unsuccessful suicide bomber, see <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPU4UN03t7E">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPU4UN03t7E</a>; see also <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70Oqo_wmuGo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70Oqo_wmuGo</a></p>
<p>[vii] For latest evidence see “UNRWA condemns discovery of rockets in Gaza school,” July 17, 2014, <a href="http://www.jta.org/2014/07/17/news-opinion/israel-middle-east/unrwa-condemns-discovery-of-rockets-in-gaza-school">http://www.jta.org/2014/07/17/news-opinion/israel-middle-east/unrwa-condemns-discovery-of-rockets-in-gaza-school</a>; האו&#8221;ם מודה: מצאנו 20 רקטות בבי&#8221;ס בעזה, <a href="http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0%2c7340%2cL-4545333%2c00.html">http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0%2c7340%2cL-4545333%2c00.html</a></p>
<p>[viii]   <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TejVJWSTTpY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TejVJWSTTpY</a>; see also <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQQFJXMrg4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQQFJXMrg4</a></p>
<p>[ix] Sheikh Ahmad Adwan: “Allah Gave the Land of Israel to the Jews,” <a href="http://www.jerusalemonline.com/news/middle-east/israel-and-the-middle-east/sheikh-ahmad-adwan-allah-gave-the-land-of-israel-to-the-jews-3516">http://www.jerusalemonline.com/news/middle-east/israel-and-the-middle-east/sheikh-ahmad-adwan-allah-gave-the-land-of-israel-to-the-jews-3516</a></p>
<p>[x] “Palliwood staging area? You decide for yourself,” <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7332726655958371305">http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7332726655958371305</a> See also “Pallywood Introduction,” <a href="http://seconddraft.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=59&amp;Itemid=199">http://seconddraft.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=59&amp;Itemid=199</a></p>
<p>[xi] Robert S. Wistrich, Muslim Anti-Semitism. A Clear and Present Danger (The American Jewish Committee, 2002), 34, <a href="http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/%7B42D75369-D582-4380-8395-D25925B85EAF%7D/WistrichAntisemitism.pdf">http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/%7B42D75369-D582-4380-8395-D25925B85EAF%7D/WistrichAntisemitism.pdf</a>; Palestinian news agency FPNP cited in Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, “Hamas police official:Israel smuggles ‘sexual stimulants’to destroy Palestinian youth” (Bulletin July 17, 2009)<strong>, </strong>PMW, <a href="http://co117w.col117.mail.live.com/default.aspx?n=1309909505">http://co117w.col117.mail.live.com/default.aspx?n=1309909505</a>; and Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 4, 2008, “Canada and the Palestinian Authority (Special Report, March 25, 2009), PMW, <a href="http://pmw.org.il/Bulletins_Apr2009.htm#b050409">http://pmw.org.il/Bulletins_Apr2009.htm#b050409</a></p>
<p>[xii] Cited in Anat Berko, <em>The Path to Paradise: The Inner World of Suicide Bombers and Their Dispatchers</em> (Praeger Security International: Westport, Connecticut-London, 2007), 110-112.</p>
<p>[xiii] “Muslim Kindergarten Graduation Ceremony,” Al-Aqsa TV, 31 May 2007, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WHdWgES-Uw&amp;NR=1&amp;feature=fvwp">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WHdWgES-Uw&amp;NR=1&amp;feature=fvwp</a></p>
<p>[xiv] אליאור לוי</p>
<p>&#8220;מסיבת סיום בגן בעזה: אתפוצץ באוטובוס&#8221;</p>
<p>12.06.2012 &#8212; <a href="http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4241559,00.html">http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4241559,00.html</a></p>
<p>[xv] 17 August 2001 sermon broadcast live on Palestinian TV from the Sheik &#8216;Ijlin mosque in Gaza, “PA TV Friday Sermon Calls for Jihad and Martyrdom, MEMRI, 24 August 2001, <a href="http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&amp;Area=conflict&amp;ID=SP26101">http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&amp;Area=conflict&amp;ID=SP26101</a></p>
<p>[xvi] Christoph Reuter, <em>My Life Is a Weapon. A Modern History of Suicide Bombing</em> (Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2002), 93.</p>
<p>[xvii] Public speech of Member of the Palestinian Legislative Council member Fathi Hamad, Al-Aqsa TV, 29 February 2008, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTu-AUE9ycs">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTu-AUE9ycs</a></p>
<p>[xviii] Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik, PMW Bulletins. PA Schools Named After Terrorists Raise Terror-Admiring Youth,” February 3, 2014, <a href="http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=10603">http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=10603</a></p>
<p>[xix] See, for example, “Pictures from the Children of Jihad (holy war) Summer Camp,” <a href="http://www.israel-wat.com/q6_eng.htm#a1">http://www.israel-wat.com/q6_eng.htm#a1</a>; <a href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2002/8/Answers+to+Frequently+Asked+Questions-+Palestinian.htm">http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2002/8/Answers+to+Frequently+Asked+Questions-+Palestinian.htm</a>; “Participation of Children and Teenagers in Terrorist Activity during the Al-Aqsa Intifada,” 30 January 2003, <a href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2003/1/Participation+of+Children+and+Teenagers+in+Terrori.htm">http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2003/1/Participation+of+Children+and+Teenagers+in+Terrori.htm</a>; and “Hitlerjugend,” <a href="http://somebodyhelpme.info/palikids/palikids.html">http://somebodyhelpme.info/palikids/palikids.html</a> (graphic images; discretion required)</p>
<p>[xx] Paul Berman, <em>Terror and Liberalism </em>(W. W. Norton &amp; Co Inc: New York, 2003), 112.</p>
<p>[xxi] “Behind the Headlines: Hamas’ Mickey Mouse teaches children to hate and kill,” Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, <a href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/About+the+Ministry/Behind+the+Headlines/Hamas+Mickey+Mouse+teaches+children+to+hate+and+kill+10-May-2007.htm">http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/About+the+Ministry/Behind+the+Headlines/Hamas+Mickey+Mouse+teaches+children+to+hate+and+kill+10-May-2007.htm</a></p>
<p>[xxii] Hamas children’s TV: “Rabbit puppet vows to eat the Jews” (8 February 2009) and “Rabbit puppet vows to kill and eat the Danes” (22 February 2008), Palestinian Media Watch, <a href="http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=455#470">http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=455#470</a></p>
<p>[xxiii] Hamas TV: Kids shown video of their mother’s suicide bombing death [Al Aqsa TV, 3 July 2009], Palestinian Media Watch, <a href="http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=1001">http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=1001</a></p>
<p>[xxiv] Steven Stalinsky, “Palestinian Authority Sermons 2000-2003,” MEMRI, 26 December 2003, <a href="http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=sr&amp;ID=SR2403">http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=sr&amp;ID=SR2403</a>; cited in &#8220;Blessings for whoever has saved a bullet in order to stick it in a Jew&#8217;s head,&#8221; 27 December 2003, Jihad Watch, <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/000501.php">http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/000501.php</a></p>
<p>[xxv] “Palestinians exploit children for terror—background,” Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, March 10, 2004, <a href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Terror+Groups/Palestinians%20exploit%20children%20for%20terror%20-%20March%202004">http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Terror+Groups/Palestinians%20exploit%20children%20for%20terror%20-%20March%202004</a></p>
<p>[xxvi] Cited in Berko, <em>The Path to Paradise</em>, 97.</p>
<p>[xxvii] Valid Shebat, “Iz Palestinskogo terrorista v plamennogo sionista,” speech 7 March 2004, <em>Spektr</em>, 7 (073), <a href="http://www.spectr.org/2004/069/shebat.htm">http://www.spectr.org/2004/073/shebat.htm</a></p>
<p>[xxviii] Anne Speckhard and Khapta Akhmedova, “Black Widows: The Chechen Female Suicide Terrorists” in Yoram Schweitzer, ed.<strong>, </strong><em>Female Suicide Bombers: Dying for Equality? </em>(The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies (JCSS), Tel Aviv University: Tel Aviv, 2006), 75;   “Teaching Hatred to Palestinian Children,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M529qurtDY0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M529qurtDY0</a>; Brainwashing Palestinian Children, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT6iKFQDEP4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT6iKFQDEP4</a></p>
<p>[xxix] Cited in “Umm Nidal: Mother of The Murderers,” 3 March 2004, Jihad Watch, <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/001047.php">http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/001047.php</a></p>
<p>[xxx] Shaul Kimhi and Shemuel Even, “Who Are the Palestinian Suicide Bombers?,” <em>Terrorism and Political Violence</em>, Vol.16, No.4 (Winter 2004): 828.</p>
<p>[xxxi] U.S. Senate Committee Hearing on Palestinian Education (2003), <a href="http://www.teachkidspeace.org/doc105.php">http://www.teachkidspeace.org/doc105.php</a>; Islam: Brainwashing Palestinian Children, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT6iKFQDEP4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT6iKFQDEP4</a></p>
<p>[xxxii] Cited in “Young Children Convinced of Death as a <em>Shahid</em> as Ideal,” [PA TV June 2002], TV Archives &#8211; Video Library, <a href="http://www.pmw.org.il/tv%20part1.html">http://www.pmw.org.il/tv%20part1.html</a></p>
<p>[xxxiii] Reported in the PA official daily Al-<em>Hayat Al-Jadida</em> on 26 December 2001, cited in Arab Indoctrination for Suicide, <a href="http://www.freeman.org/m_online/nov03/indoctrination.htm">http://www.freeman.org/m_online/nov03/indoctrination.htm</a></p>
<p>[xxxiv] <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/07/gaza-child-three-wars-old-2014716505446437.html">http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/07/gaza-child-three-wars-old-2014716505446437.html</a></p>
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		<title>Why Terrorism Strikes at Children</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/anna-geifman/why-terrorism-strikes-at-children/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-terrorism-strikes-at-children</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Jul 2014 04:39:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Anna Geifman]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235431</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In blessed memory of Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel, z’’l.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/nm.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235444" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/nm-450x270.jpg" alt="nm" width="303" height="182" /></a>Acts of terror against the young are the unadvertised “latest trend” in global political violence. For the first time since the Holocaust, slaying children has turned into a modus operandi. Since 9/11, they are terrorists’ preferred targets.</p>
<p>The Targets:</p>
<p>Episodes of child-directed violence occurred as early as May 1970 in Israel, when thirty-four children were killed and wounded in the Avivim school bus massacre. In May 1974 hostage-takers in Ma’alot detonated hand grenades and sprayed high school students with machine-gun fire. In April 1980, terrorists took hold of the nursery in kibbutz Misgav Am, killed an infant and injured four children. In July of that year, in Antwerp, Belgium, a Fatah member cast hand grenades into a group of Jewish schoolchildren at a bus stop.</p>
<p>After the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000, casualties among the Israeli young multiplied. In a single episode in June 2001, twenty-one teenagers lost their lives in the “Delphinarium” discotheque in Tel Aviv. By mid-2002, child-targeting become systematic: bomb explosion in Jerusalem next to a group of women with baby carriages (March 2); bombing of a discotheque in Tel Aviv (May 24); children killed in a Petah Tikva ice cream parlor (May 27).</p>
<p>When zoomed-in on selected Israeli localities, the picture becomes grim indeed. In Itamar, a gunman shot to death two students playing basketball outside the Hitzim school and then killed three more teenagers inside in May 2002. About a month later, two militants broke into the home of the Shabo family, killed the mother and her children, ages fifteen, twelve, and five, and severely wounded a ten-year-old and a thirteen-year-old. In another month, a terrorist broke into another private home, stabbed the husband and wife and them ran his knife through the empty beds of their eight children, away with grandparents. In March 2011 the Fogel family was slaughtered: along with their parents, stabbed to death was a boy of eleven, his four-year-old brother, and their three-month old sister; at the trial, terrorists regretted not to have noticed two other sleeping children</p>
<p>Itamar is a settlement where “Jewish fanatics” are said to “provoke victimized Arabs” to kill children as the only response against occupation. But Sderot is not a disputed terroritory. &#8220;A present for the start of the new school year,&#8221; the Islamic Jihad website flaunted first of their September 2007 missile strikes, which sent twelve Sderot kindergarteners to the hospital to be treated for shock.[i] Terrorists send 3,200 Qassam rockets against this Israeli town in 2008.[ii] Residents reported that the shelling intensified when children were on their way to and from classes.</p>
<p>Attacks on schools and yeshivas in Israel reached their peak with the massacre at Merkaz HaRav in Jerusalem in March 2008. All but one of the children had just gotten off a yellow school bus in Sa&#8217;ad on April 7, 2011 when a targeted missile hit, mortally wounding the remaining boy. On March 19 the following year, a self-styled Al-Qaeda operative opened fire in a Jewish school in Toulouse, France.</p>
<p>&#8220;If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. . . . They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine,” some Islamist clerics admit openly and urge: we will &#8220;annihilate them, until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth.&#8221;[iii] It is as if the Biblical Amalek has finally broken portentous silence to speak his mind about the annihilation of Israel&#8211;his raison d’être. According to the tradition, Amalek attacks from the rear, slaying the least protected, especially children. Yet, while Amalek’s hate is for Israel alone, his accomplices today do not discriminate any kids.</p>
<p>Muslim children are among their first victims. In Iraq they are assaulted in school buildings and on playgrounds—in Baghdad, Ramadi, Tuz Khurmato, and Ba&#8217;qubah (July 13, 2005, December 3, 2006; January 28, 2007, October 12, 2007, January 22, 2008, and December 7, 2009), to list a few cases. On May 6, 2007 the Islamists bombed a UN-run elementary school in the Gaza refugee camp of Rafah during a sports festival, which the extremists had declared un-Islamic. A suicide car school bombing on December 28, 2008 in Khost, Afghanistan, was one of 1,153 Taliban acts against young students in two preceding years—via shootings, torture, acid, arson, grenades, mines, and rockets.[iv] Boko Haram of Nigeria has been targeting schools since 2010. Thousands of children have been unable to attend classes as a result; hundreds have been killed to confirm the Jihadists’ stand against Westernized education. More than 200 girls kidnapped on the night of 14-15 April, 2014 are still missing: Boko Haram terrorists oppose female education; in the past, they have used abducted schoolgirls as sex slaves.[v]</p>
<p>When Thailand militants assailed a school bus in Ratchaburi province in June 2002, no one saw the atrocity as a sign of a new trend. Yet, in the decade that followed targeting children turned into a tactic that crossed all geographical and ideological lines. On July 2011 a self-styled “crusader” against European leftists and Muslims killed 69 people in a shooting spree in the Norwegian youth summer camp on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ut%C3%B8ya">Utøya</a> island; 50 victims were 18-years old and younger.</p>
<p>Why the young?</p>
<p>Terror stipulates unceasing acceleration. When successful, perpetrators seek to take advantage of intensifying anxiety and strive to build up momentum. Random, <em>en masse </em>brutality against civilians—emblematic for the 20<sup>th</sup>-century terror&#8211;culminated in a spectacular act of apocalyptic destruction on 9/11. It made conspicuous that real targets are not those who die. The violent act is a ghastly message whose purpose is to intimidate the broader public, physically unaffected by bloodshed. The next round of sustained terrorization required increasingly severe psychological and emotional impact, not necessarily measured by casualty count.</p>
<p>Terrorists are nihilists<em> par excellence</em>: they strike at the essence of the mainstream culture, seeking to wipe out its pivotal symbols and meanings. In the new millennia, amid a raging sea of conflicting concepts, pluralistic connotations, confusing priorities, habitual skepticism, intellectual and ethical relativism, perhaps the only enduring value are children. The essentiality of their welfare, health, and security remain implicit and unconditional; no sane person will claim that while it is not nice to hurt children, there is another side to the argument. Today, children are the last consecrated absolute. For its part, militant nihilism strives to ruin first and foremost what their contemporaries hold sacred.</p>
<p>On September 1, 2004, amid the festivities on the “Day of Knowledge,” 32 terrorists held hostage 1,200 children, parents, and teachers inside School No. 1 in the town of Beslan in North Ossetia. The hostage-takers declared their unattainable demand for Russia’s evacuation of Chechnya and their real intention: “We are the terrorists, we’re here to slay.”[vi] What followed “probably was the single most horrific act since the downfall of National Socialism.”[vii] Indeed, the terrorists have turned the school into a mini-replica of a death camp, denying children food, water, and medications for three days. Dozens of little hostages perished in flames when a bomb detonated inside the building; dozens were shot in the back as they jumped out of windows and ran for their lives after the security forces attacked. Among at least 334 fatalities, 186 were Christian and Muslim children; over 700 were wounded in this “carefully planned mass murder operation.”[viii]</p>
<p>“Nothing horrifies more than the murder of children” because it “is the ultimate rejection of life.” Among the suicide terrorists there are those “who not only wish to destroy their own life, but life in general. These are the candidates for mass killings,” particularly child killings because children are the quintessence of vitality, of sparkling aliveness, the most vibrant and spontaneous of the living, emblematic of life itself. They are also our connection to the future, a link to immortality; by attacking children, terrorists seek to destroy life-as-is and life-to-be.[ix]</p>
<p>Death Worship:</p>
<p>Terrorists have repeatedly declared that they “desire Death” and love it as much as others love life.[x]Beneath a thin veneer baring attributes of various ideological trends, they are engaged in a form of politicized idolatry. They slaughter children as the designated, most pure, and perfect sacrifice to death, which they worship: “Eyal, Gilad and Naftali were killed by people who believed in death”.[xi]</p>
<p>Modern death-worship is part of a long tradition. “Even their sons and their daughters do they burn in the fire to their gods” (Deuteronomy 12:31). Throughout the past century, this prophecy has been repeatedly fulfilled: be it the Nazi Hitlerjugen or the Iranian <em>Basij</em> project—various ideologies have validated child-sacrifices. The Jihadists offer Muslim children to Moloch as suicide bombers and human shields. Under Jihadist couching, between 72 and 80 per cent of children living in the Palestinian Authority yearn to die as martyrs.[xii] When in power, as in Gaza, terrorists construct for children under their control an official, prescribed culture in which death is preferred to life.</p>
<p>The Biblical commandment to “choose life” entails a possibility to opt for death. Militant nihilists do so, and the roots of their destructiveness are infinitely deeper than any political dispute. “That is the difference between a culture of life and one of death, and this has become the battle of our time, not only in Israel but in Syria, in Iraq, in Nigeria and elsewhere.” This battle, in fact, has been waged for thousands of years, and—invariably—“cultures that worship death, die, while those that sanctify life, live on. . . . May the God of life, in whose image we are, teach all humanity to serve Him by sanctifying life.”[xiii]</p>
<p><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
<p>[i] Cited in Anav Silverman, “<a href="http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/rocketlife">Living with Rockets:</a> Sderot students ready for school bells &#8211; and rocket sirens,” <em>Jerusalem Post</em>, 3 September 2009, <a href="http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/rocketlife/entry/sderot_students_ready_for_school">http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/rocketlife/entry/sderot_students_ready_for_school</a></p>
<p>[ii] “Follow up to Operation Cast Lead: A Summary of Statistics,” Sderot Media Center, <a href="http://sderotmedia.org.il/bin/content.cgi?ID=309&amp;q=6&amp;s=16">http://sderotmedia.org.il/bin/content.cgi?ID=309&amp;q=6&amp;s=16</a></p>
<p>[iii] Al-Rahma TV (Egypt), Jan. 17, 2009 cited in Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, “When Hatemongering is Common Currency,” <em>Ottawa Citizen</em>, April 24, 2009 (online edition), <a href="http://pmw.org.il/Bulletins_Apr2009.htm#b050409">http://pmw.org.il/Bulletins_Apr2009.htm#b050409</a></p>
<p>[iv] “Education under Attack 2010 – Afghanistan,” UNHCR (The UN Refugee Agency), 10 February 2010, <a href="http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4b7aa9e6c.html">http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4b7aa9e6c.html</a></p>
<p>[v] <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/Damien_McElroy/">Damien McElroy</a>, “Extremist attack in Nigeria kills 42 at boarding school,” <em>The Telegraph</em>, July 6, 2013, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/nigeria/10163942/Extremist-attack-in-Nigeria-kills-42-at-boarding-school.html">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/nigeria/10163942/Extremist-attack-in-Nigeria-kills-42-at-boarding-school.html</a> Oren Dorell, “Terrorists kidnap more than 200 Nigerian girls, “ <em>USA Today</em>, April 21, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/04/21/parents-234-girls-kidnapped-from-nigeria-school/7958307/</p>
<p>[vi] Anna Geifman, <em>Death Orders: the Vanguard of Modern Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia</em> (Praeger, 2010), 4.</p>
<p>[vii]   Spengler, “Terror and School Shootings,” <a href="http://www.newageislam.com/current-affairs/terror-and-school-shootings-sides-of-same-coin/d/9764">http://www.newageislam.com/current-affairs/terror-and-school-shootings-sides-of-same-coin/d/9764</a></p>
<p>[viii] David Brooks, “Cult of Death,” <em>New York Times</em>, September 7, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/07/opinion/07brooks.html</p>
<p>[ix] Spengler (David P. Goldman), “Terror and School Shootings Sides of Same Coin,” Current Affairs (21 December 2012 NewAgeIslam.Com), <a href="http://www.newageislam.com/current-affairs/terror-and-school-shootings-sides-of-same-coin/d/9764">http://www.newageislam.com/current-affairs/terror-and-school-shootings-sides-of-same-coin/d/9764</a></p>
<p>[x] See, for example, Fathi Hamad, Al-Aqsa TV, 29 February 2008, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTu-AUE9ycs">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTu-AUE9ycs</a>; John Dawson, “The Bali Bombers: What Motivates Death Worship?,” <em>Capitalism Magazine </em>(October 19, 2003), <a href="http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3000">http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3000</a>; Geifman, Death Orders, 100, 151-52.</p>
<p>[xi] Former Chief Rabbi of the UK, Lord Sacks, “Op-Ed: In Memoriam: Eyal, Gilad and Naftali, June 30, 2014, <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/15259">http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/15259</a></p>
<p>[xii] U.S. Senate Committee Hearing on Palestinian Education (2003), http://www.teachkidspeace.org/doc105.php</p>
<p>[xiii] Former Chief Rabbi of the UK, Lord Sacks, “Op-Ed: In Memoriam: Eyal, Gilad and Naftali, June 30, 2014, <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/15259">http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/15259</a></p>
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		<title>When Terrorists Become State Leaders, Part II</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Feb 2011 04:11:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Anna Geifman]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Soviet Russia's "Red Terror" has much to teach us about the current crisis in Egypt.]]></description>
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<p><strong>[Editor&#8217;s note: The following is the second half of chapter 8 of Anna Geifman&#8217;s powerful new book, </strong><em><strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Death-Orders-Terrorism-Revolutionary-International/dp/0275997529">Death Orders</a></strong></em><strong>, which exposes the chilling parallels between Soviet and Islamic terrorism. Unfortunately, as Professor  Geifman explains, events unfolding today in Egypt are all too familiar,  harkening back to the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/02/11/when-terrorists-become-state-leaders-part-i/">Part I</a> of  chapter 8 appeared in our previous issue.] </strong></p>
<p>The escalating terror demanded constant expansion of “manpower of the Cheka . . . from some 2,000 men in the mid-1918 to over 35,000 six months later.”73 The Bolsheviks partly solved their problem of filling the staff vacancies by recruiting aggravated national minorities—Armenians, Jews, and Latvians—many of whom had previously been involved in the struggle against Russian imperial domination.  Lenin favored them strongly as “more brutal and less susceptible to bribery” than “soft Russians.”74 He also sought the expertise of “professionals”—the jobless Okhrana employees.  Ironically, some of them excelled in their Cheka work side by side with their former prisoners—the ex-terrorists.</p>
<p>For professional terrorists whose primary occupation before 1917 was bloodletting, the revolution presented an opportunity to return from their places of imprisonment or foreign exile and apply themselves once again to what they did best.  Most of them did not know any other trade; they were experts in serving prison terms and, once out, in killing—quite in the spirit of Nechaev’s dictum:  a true revolutionary “knows only one science: the science of destruction.”75 After the Bolshevik takeover, they joined and often led the provincial and district bureaus of the Cheka, worked in the revolutionary tribunals, and after 1922, in the repressive organs of the GPU (State Political Administration).76Dzerzhinskii and his two Moscow Cheka associates, Latsis and Mikhail Kedrov had been involved in extremist practices against tsarist authorities and the bourgeoisie.77 In the periphery, especially in the Urals, where they had carried out expropriations, the Bolsheviks were most successful in reassembling their old bandit-like cadres.  After 1917 Lenin trusted them with terror-related tasks of special importance, including the execution of the imperial family and murder of Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich Romanov.78</p>
<p>Former SRs, Maximalists, anarchists, and other terrorists also volunteered as perpetrators of the Red Terror.  Despite rife harassment of fellow-radicals, they held on to a vanishing hope to preserve a united revolutionary front by proving their loyalty to Lenin’s regime.  Alongside with the Bolsheviks, they built the Soviet machinery of repression—soon to become the instrument of their demise.79</p>
<p>The Bolsheviks were not alone to blame for raging brutality in Russia after their takeover and especially during the ensuing Civil War; the Red Terror may be compared with an array of atrocities perpetrated by the Whites.  Yet, the difference between the Red and the White forces was as fundamental as it was between the tsarist state and the terrorists:  an army does not come to fulfill a need for a new way of life; it is not a road to salvation.”  It “is an instrument for bolstering, protecting and expanding the present,” whereas the ideological movement comes to destroy it.  “Its preoccupation is with the future:”80 in the Bolshevik case, with Communist apocalypse and deliverance.  To overlook the familiar trap of moral equivalency would be to disregard that, pursuing the millennial prophesy,</p>
<p>Lenin&#8217;s government used terror as a method of social engineering.  The Whites had never cherished a goal of recasting Russian society.  . . .  The Communist terror on the other hand was part of a grand design to eliminate entire social groups of the population by violence, as obstacles to what the Communists called socialism.  . . . The Red Terror . . . established and routinized the practice of &#8216;processing&#8217; entire social strata of people without regard to personal guilt or lack thereof.81</p>
<p>Lenin&#8217;s repressions were ideology-based and theory-justified, applied to entire groups which the party in power labeled ideologically impure.  “Proletarian repression in all its forms, beginning with executions . . . is a method of molding the communist man from the human material of the capitalist epoch,” elucidated Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin.82 And according to Left SR Isaac Steinberg, Commissar of Justice already during the initial months of the Soviet rule, terror was an all-encompassing &#8220;system . . . a legalized plan of the regime for the purpose of mass intimidation, mass compulsion, mass extermination. . . .  The concept keeps on enlarging until . . . it comes to embrace the entire land, the entire population”83 because any person or “group not controlled by the Party is, actually or potentially, an enemy.”84</p>
<p>Whereas we commonly assume that fear became a dominant factor of Russian life only during Stalin&#8217;s reign of terror, contemporaries remembered otherwise: &#8220;the new regime mowed people right and left without discriminating much&#8221; between the guilty and the innocent, and already during the early months of the Soviet rule people lived in terror of random house searches, arrests, and imprisonment, affirmed writer Mikhail Osorgin.85“There is no such sphere of life in which the Cheka would not be required to have its penetrating eye,” a high-posted Bolshevik official explained.86 The apparent absurdity of repression was, in fact, an important element in Lenin&#8217;s effort to create an atmosphere of total intimidation; “the more irrational the terror, the more effective it was, because it made the very process of rational calculation irrelevant, reducing people to the status of a cowed herd.”  The frightened people in power thus sought to undermine the humanity of those under their control and to intimidate them “in order to reassure themselves of the legitimacy, strength, and longevity of their regime.”87</p>
<p>The more invested revolutionaries are in the realization of an all-encompassing vision, the less is the cost of life, notes Camus; “in an extreme case, it is not worth a penny.”88Consumed by the totality of their project, Lenin&#8217;s associates did not feel the need to embellish their actions or conceal the extent of repressive policies.  “We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia&#8217;s population,” declared Grigorii Zinov&#8217;ev in mid-September 1918.  &#8220;As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them.  They must be annihilated.&#8221;89</p>
<p>The Red Terror did not end with the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War&#8211;as it would have, had it been a reluctantly-adopted weapon of self-defensive and not a quintessential component of the coercive regime.  A Communist writer called terror “a costume,” which, like a mask, could be stored away “to be taken out again in case of need.”90 Although the Bolsheviks did put a stop to “the indiscriminate massacres of 1918-19, they made certain to leave intact the laws and institutions which had made them possible.&#8221;  Indeed, already by 1920, &#8220;Soviet Russia had become a police state in the sense that the security police, virtually a state within the state, spread its tentacles to all Soviet institutions.&#8221;  In addition to a growing staff of investigators, interrogation officers, guards, and other prison personnel, the secret police relied on the Armies of the Internal Security of the Republic, which by the middle of 1920 consisted of nearly a quarter of a million men.  Aside from its other duties, this internal army guarded concentration and forced labor camps, of which by the end of that year there were 84 with approximately 50,000 prisoners.  Only three years later, the number of camps increased to 315 with 70,000 inmates.  When Stalin—former chief of the Bolshevik combatants in the Caucasus—emerged as undisputed master of Soviet Russia in the late 1920s, “all the instruments which he required to resume the terror on an incomparably vaster scale lay at hand.&#8221;91</p>
<p>Perhaps even more significantly, masses of people were accustomed to violence:  “We are no longer frightened by the mysterious and the once unfathomable Death, for it has become our second life.  We are not moved by the pungent smell of human blood, for its vapors saturate the air that we breathe.  We are already not shuddered by the endless rows marching to the execution, for we have seen the last tremors of children shot in the streets; we saw mountains of mutilated and frozen victims of terrorist madness. . .  We are accustomed. . .  This is why, facing the triumphant Death, the country is silent. . . Its poisoned soul is incarcerated by Death.”92 Then, as the state itself became the instrument of Stalin’s Great Terror, nothing stopped it from inflicting death for death’s sake.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>Many Western intellectuals, including such notables as George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, Bertolt Brecht, and Louis Aragon, were mesmerized by Communist Russia in its darkest hour of Stalin’s terror&#8211;to the point of not noticing millions of his victims&#8211;imprisoned, purposely starved, exploited, and remolded into automatons to satisfy the needs of triumphant tyranny.  These great skeptics, who took no idea for granted, extolled the Soviet paradise and fell short of discerning the Big Lie for lack of powers other than mental, despite Lenin allegedly dubbing them “useful idiots of the West.”  Conversely, they used their intellect with utmost dexterity&#8211;as a shield—not to allow into consciousness and not to “admit to themselves or anyone else that the millennial experiment in which they had invested so much (intellectual) energy could have failed.”93</p>
<p>After his visit to Moscow in 1937—the date still a Russian euphemism for oppression and terror—Lion Feuchtwanger said that in the East he had “seen the magnificent” and witnessed true justice.94 What is it that united him with other “political pilgrims,” writers and journalists, followers in the footsteps of a Stalin apologist, The New York Times’ Walter Duranty, who had nothing but praise for state terrorism in Cuba, Albania, North Korea, Vietnam, and China?  Chomsky, while calling for the “denazification” of the United States, insisted that the people in Cambodia probably did not regard “the austere standard of hard manual labor” as “an onerous imposition” of the Khmer Rouge regime, which in 1975-1978 claimed 1,650,000 lives—one of five citizens. We should consider whether to treat this figure as an “extensive fabrication of evidence”95 or as evidence for intellectual hypocrisy to defend a “lofty cause.”</p>
<p>Fascination with oppressive regimes in far-away lands serves as “the foil” for the intellectuals’ frustration with “the existential meaninglessness” of their world, concomitant self-hating guilt and variants of the Stockholm syndrome.  Disappointed with the liberal path to salvation, the political pilgrims succumb to their self-destructive longing to identify with Sartre’s aggressive visionary “supermen,” who allegedly “exercise a veritable dictatorship over their own needs” and “roll back the limits of the possible.”96In their travelogues of Soviet Russia, they did “record a kind of pilgrimage to the Mecca of revolution.”97 Today they are awestruck with the power of radical Islam that collides with every value sacred to humanism, yet holds another promise of deliverance.  The prophecy is encapsulated in Foucault’s endorsement of Iranian fundamentalism, in which he saw potential for “political spirituality.”  Muslims comprise “a core constituency of the Left” in many European countries.98 Overwhelmingly secular, its adherents are attracted to any higher cause of redemption and the holy “unity of mankind, irrelevant under which banner—red or green.”99</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>The fatal attraction of Communism—“the opium of the intellectuals”100&#8211;was that it was messianic.  Its atheism notwithstanding, it contained an enormous potential of an avowedly scientific prediction championed as faith and venerated.101 Concealed beneath a veneer of orthodox Marxism, discernable was the revolutionaries’ deeper goal that lay in the realm of the existential:  to find the ultimate answer to a pivotal quandary of being—its transience and finality, to overcome the inevitability of demise.  Nathan Leites considers the extremist mindset in the context of a distinctively “Russian horror of death against which Bolshevism reacts.”102 Broader than a specifically national rejoinder to the dread of extinction, we are dealing with the communist secular metaphysics and its response to mortality.  It was to be overpowered via a brilliant paradox, entailing the elimination of the individual—the source of the predicament.</p>
<p>“Alone—free—the human being is always defeated.  It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.”  But, Orwell outlines the totalitarian alternative in 1984, if the man “can make complete, utter submission . . . if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party,” then “the death of the individual is not death.”  The notion is only tenuously related to mysticism, insinuated and popularized in the famous line from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar:  “To conquer death, you only have to die.”  Yet, the momentous nihilist invention repudiated the age-old spiritual path of personal deliverance to uphold collective eternity&#8211;at the dire price for the individual.  The issue of mortality would simply be extraneous as one’s identity ceased to exist, his corporeal “I” fused with “a common destiny,” and dissolved in the eternal “group mind.”103</p>
<p>The Bolshevik conspiracy in power sought to expand infinitely the concept of “a group,” to encompass millions of “others,” transforming each into a selfless cell in a gigantic and everlasting state organism.  “I am happy to be a particle of this power,” acknowledged Maiakovskii.  He obsessed about dying all his life, displaced anxiety by “numberless murders in his poetry,” espoused the communist non-being and, “old by the age of thirty,” surrendered to death by suicide.104</p>
<p>For Bolshevik leader Bogdanov, “collectivism was a religion, and even promised a triumph over death,” necessarily surrogate, with the individual living “on through the memory of the collective.”  He was fascinated with blood and founded the Moscow Institute of Blood Transfusion, whose purposes were to exceed just medical: “For Bogdanov, blood is the very substance which should be exchanged between comrades and thus comradeship will flow directly into the bodies of the proletarians.” “Almost mystical” was Bogdanov’s reverence for the Communist commune, in which “workers will lose their sense of an individual ‘I’ in favor of an all-encompassing ‘we’ that will some day triumph over nature and achieve collective immortality.”105 His party colleague Martin Liadov envisaged that in the future communist society each person “will feel pain . . . if his personal interests in any way contradicted the interests of the collective.”106</p>
<p>Among Bolsheviks fixated on immortality was Krasin, the 1905-era expert in terror.  He predicted in 1920 that the moment “will come when science will become all-powerful, that it will be able to recreate a deceased organism&#8221; and even “to resurrect great historical figures.&#8221;  Lenin death in January 1924 presented “an obvious choice;” in February, Krasin insisted that the significance of Lenin&#8217;s grave would surpass that of Mecca and Jerusalem and urged the construction of a mausoleum.107 There the incarnation of Bolshevism would be preserved—we are to assume, until his next earthly life.  Lenin left us with little evidence about his attitude towards death, but in an incidental and ostensibly half-conscious statement he expressed a conviction that “those who really merit the name of a political personality do not die in politics when they die physically.”108</p>
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		<title>When Terrorists Become State Leaders</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/anna-geifman/when-terrorists-become-state-leaders-part-i/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=when-terrorists-become-state-leaders-part-i</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Feb 2011 04:00:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Anna Geifman]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Soviet Russia's "Red Terror" has much to teach us about the current crisis in Egypt. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/when.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-84697" title="when" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/when.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="251" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>[Editor&#8217;s note: The following is the first half of chapter 8 of Anna Geifman&#8217;s powerful new book, </strong><em><strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Death-Orders-Terrorism-Revolutionary-International/dp/0275997529">Death Orders</a></strong></em><strong>, which exposes the chilling parallels between Soviet and Islamic terrorism. Unfortunately, as Professor Geifman explains, events unfolding today in Egypt are all too familiar, harkening back to the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/02/14/when-terrorists-become-state-leaders-part-ii/">Part II </a>of chapter 8 will appear in our <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/02/14/when-terrorists-become-state-leaders-part-ii/">next issue</a>.] </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">
<p style="text-align: left;"><em>We must execute not only the guilty.  Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em> </em>&#8211;Bolshevik Commissar of Justice Nikolai Krylenko</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em>Execute mercilessly.</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em> </em> &#8211;Lev Trotsky´s telegram to comrades in Astrakhan´, March 1919</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">The first time in history terrorists seized control of a state in 1917&#8211;in Russia, the birthplace of modern political extremism. There, adherents of a totalist ideology, men with extensive radical background and subversive experience, set out to rule by way of genocidal “Red Terror” against designated “class enemies.”<sup>1</sup> A similar situation developed next in Afghanistan, where the Sunni Islamist Taliban held power from 1996 to 2001, relying on state-sponsored violence against “enemies of Islam´.  In recent years, Hamas has been using similar methods for consolidating Islamist rule in Gaza.  Radical Shiite Hezbollah has made major advances in controlling Lebanon.  Present-day dramatic events in Cairo are alarming indeed:  are Egypt´s own jihadists to imitate the terrorists-come-to-power scenario?  The concern is valid especially because Egyptian developments over the past two weeks seem to replicate—sometimes to astonishing detail—the initial events of the 1917 revolution in Russia.  Is Egypt to emulate a fateful twist of transitory politics in a far-away land hundred years ago, where following the collapse of the autocratic regime, the extremists usurped control via a coup that toppled the ineffectual provisional government?  Since then, the cardinal feature of the newly-established Soviet rule was its dependence terrorist mentality and on unremitting state-sponsored political violence.  Terror manifested itself immediately after the Bolshevik takeover and escalated into sanguinary years of the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921 and beyond.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">* * *</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Lenin and his associates relied on the pre-1917 terrorist mentality and practices while building their “Communist paradise.”  Aside from defending expropriations as legitimate methods of revolutionary fundraising, prior to the Bolshevik takeover, Lenin had urged his followers to establish armed combat detachments for the purpose of killing the gendarmes and Cossacks and blowing up their headquarters.  Since 1905, he also advocated the use of explosives, boiling water and acid against soldiers, the police, and supporters of the tsarist regime.<sup>2</sup> Throughout the empire the Bolsheviks took part in terrorist activities, including those of major political significance, such as the 1907 murder of celebrated poet and social reformer Count Il’ia Chavchavadze, arguably the most popular national figure in turn-of-the-century Georgia.<sup>3</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Having taken over the Russian administration, Lenin and Trotsky labeled opponents of violence &#8220;eunuchs and pharisees&#8221;<sup>4</sup> and proceeded to implement government-sponsored machinery of state terror—projecting the conspiratorial and semicriminal nature of the Bolshevik fraction onto the new dictatorial regime.  The Bolsheviks endorsed a policy they called the “Red Terror”—an instrument of repression in the hands of the revolutionary government&#8211; as a precondition for success in a seemingly visionary endeavor by a handful of political extremists to establish control over Russia’s population.  For this purpose, the Bolsheviks must to “put an end once and for all of the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life,” Trotsky proclaimed.<sup>5</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">In their rhetoric, Lenin’s followers presented the Jacobin policies as a model for their own version of La Terreur, and themselves as descendents of the French radicals.  “Each Social Democrat must be a terrorist à la Robespierre, Plekhanov was heard saying, and for once Lenin was in full agreement with the Menshevik’s plan:  “We will not shoot at the tsar and his servants now as the Socialists-Revolutionaries do, but after the victory we will erect a guillotine in Kazanskii Square for them and many others.”<sup>6</sup> In the Bolshevik view, terrorization from above was also an expedient tool in restructuring the traditional society in accordance with the Marxist doctrine.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Building on the notion of “motiveless terror” of the 1905 era, the Bolsheviks launched their campaign of state-sponsored coercion against groups of individuals designated as &#8220;class enemies&#8221; of the proletarian dictatorship, with extermination now being “class based.”  In one of the first references to their new course, on 2 December 1917, Trotsky declared before a revolutionary gathering:  “There is nothing immoral in the proletariat finishing off the dying class.  This is its right.  You are indignant . . . at the petty terror which we direct against our class opponents.  But be put on notice that in one month at most this terror will assume more frightful forms, on the model of the great revolutionaries of France.”<sup>7</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">State terror as an ideological weapon the Bolsheviks justified as a rejoinder to a wide range of anti-Soviet activity allegedly perpetrated by a myriad of their internal and foreign enemies&#8211;Russian reactionaries, interventionists, and counterrevolutionaries of various leanings&#8211;all supposedly out to destroy the communist regime.  The “accusation of terrorism . . . falls not on us but on the bourgeoisie.  It forced terror on us,” Lenin claimed the exigency for killing in self-defense, echoing the paranoid defensiveness of the terrorists during the underground period.<sup>8</sup> In reality, he had planned mass repressions a decade before he has had a chance to introduce them as a state policy, as early as 1908 dreaming of &#8220;real, nation-wide terror, which reinvigorates the country.&#8221;<sup>9</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">The Bolsheviks established their notorious political police, the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage), months before any organized opposition to the Soviets had had a chance to develop.<sup>10</sup> The Cheka began its operations formally, if secretly, almost immediately after the Bolshevik takeover &#8212; on 7 December 1917, and would soon become a primary instrument of the Red Terror, in accordance with Lenin’s pronouncement in the following month:  “if we are guilty of anything, it is of having been too humane, too benevolent, towards the representatives of the bourgeois-imperialist order.”<sup>11</sup> By the first half of 1918, after the Cheka had already had its debut in repression, &#8220;counterrevolutionary organizations . . . as such were not observed,&#8221; acknowledged its deputy director, Iakov Peters, known as &#8220;Peters, the Terrorist.&#8221;<sup> 12</sup> At the same period, in June 1918, the first Cheka head, &#8220;Iron Feliks&#8221; Dzerzhinskii declared that terror was &#8220;an absolute necessity,&#8221; and that the repressive measures would go on in the name of the revolution, “even if its sword does by chance sometimes fall upon the heads of the innocent.&#8221;<sup>13</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Originally, the Bolsheviks had envisaged the Cheka as an investigative, rather than repressive agency; its primary function was to gather intelligence and prevent offenses against the state.  Having no official judiciary powers, the Cheka was legally required to leave prosecution, indictment, and final sentencing of political offenders to the new Soviet courts, the so called revolutionary tribunals, introduced in late November 1917.<sup>14</sup> But the tribunals&#8217; tendency to linger on proprieties threatened the efficiency of Lenin&#8217;s envisaged rule &#8220;unrestricted by any laws.&#8221;  As a solution, the Bolshevik leadership extended the Cheka&#8217;s original mandate.  Whereas its central offices in Petrograd and Moscow temporarily abstained from executing political nonconformists, on 23 February 1918, Dzerzhinskii urged provincial and district cadres to set up local Cheka bureaus, arrest counterrevolutionaries, and &#8220;execute them wherever apprehended.&#8221;  Enemies of the revolution would be &#8220;mercilessly liquidated on the spot,&#8221; the authorities announce publicly.<sup>15</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Accordingly, the Cheka bureaus in the periphery began to resort routinely to summary judiciary procedures.  Unlimited by even the most cursory legal norms, they meted out arbitrary, often impetuous and unwarranted punishments, including death sentences.<sup>16</sup> Their primary focus at the moment was on combating economic felony, such as &#8220;speculation,&#8221; which “encompassed practically any independent commercial activity,&#8221; and &#8220;sabotage,&#8221; i.e. refusal of technical experts and professionals to offer their services to the Bolshevik-controlled economy.<sup>17</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">In July 1918 the Bolsheviks massacred the Russian imperial family— a dramatic episode of primary psychological significance, which took place six weeks before Red Terror was inaugurated as an official policy.  The Soviets relegated responsibility for the decision to murder of the Romanov family in Ekaterinburg to local revolutionary activists.  In truth, the secret order to execute former tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their five children, a valet, cook, parlor maid, and family doctor was issued in the Bolshevik headquarters in Moscow and carried out by a special Cheka squad.  It was not for nothing that Lenin was a great admirer of Nechaev, the expert in bonding a subversive group with the accountability for a collective crime.  Lenin, too, understood that when his party was in danger of being abandoned by many vacillating supporters blood would “cement its deserting following.”  Trotsky supported Lenin’s decision as “not only expedient but necessary.  The severity of this punishment showed everyone that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing.  The execution of the Tsar’s family was needed not only to frighten, horrify, and instill a sense of hopelessness in the enemy but also to shake up our own ranks, to show that there was no retreating, that ahead lay either total victory or total doom.”<sup>18</sup> From then on, the extremists had to sustain slaughter; otherwise, in their own eyes, past bloodletting would be meaningless and deplorable.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">On August 30, 1918, Moisei Uritskii was assassinated as the head of the Cheka in Petrograd.  As a questionable coincidence, on the same day government sources issued an announcement about an attempt on Lenin’s life in Moscow.  The Bolsheviks interpreted these attacks as a coordinated action of a large-scale conspiracy—an unfounded assumption that elicited their instantaneous and inundating fear.  Panic-stricken, Lenin&#8217;s followers mitigated their apprehension by unleashing a mass campaign of violence.  The Red Terror did not begin but dramatically magnified at this time, encompassing retaliation and revenge, marked by infinite cruelty&#8211;against real, alleged, and potential adversary:  &#8220;Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies by the scores of hundreds, let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood.  For the blood of Lenin and Uritskii . . . let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie&#8211;more blood, as much as possible.”<sup>19</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Under such pretext, after 30 August 1918 the Bolsheviks no longer bothered to conceal brutality.  The Cheka arrested civilians randomly and executed them arbitrarily in a sweeping effort to liquidate class enemies—a loosely-defined category that the Bolsheviks continuously expanded.  A prominent Cheka officer Martyn Latsis made a newspaper declaration: “Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession.  These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.”<sup>20</sup> Soon, the Soviets developed a favorite “counter-counterrevolutionary measure”&#8211;hostage-taking.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">The radicals’ attitude toward the use of hostages shifted from People’s Will’s explicit denial of any intention to punish their enemies by kidnapping their family members, to lonely voices advocating as early as 1903 the capturing of government officials and representatives of the bourgeoisie for the purpose of using them as bargaining chips in later negotiations with the authorities.<sup>21</sup> After 1905, revolutionaries in the Baltics did seize civilian hostages,<sup>22</sup> and prominent Bolshevik Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich proposed to St. Petersburg Committee to grab “a couple of so grand dukes” to blackmail the authorities.<sup>23</sup> The extremists would occasionally turn against and hurt family members to threaten their enemies; in a notable incident, the terrorists murdered the father of a police informer to use his funeral as an opportunity to assassinate the son, their real target.<sup>24</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">In September 1918, as an initial step of the intensifying Red Terror, the Bolsheviks shot “in reprisal” 512 hostages, most of them “high notables” of the old regime.  Simultaneously, the government decreed:  in order to intimidate and punish the opposition, class enemies <em>and their relatives</em> would be sent to concentration camps.<sup>25</sup> By 1919 their number increased dramatically, prison camps serving as trial models for the Gulag</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">The practice of hostage-taking became routine.  Used as slave labor, imprisoned families of counterrevolutionary suspects were also potential &#8220;execution material.&#8221;  The Cheka firing squads shot these civilians regularly as a collective punishment,<sup>26</sup> occasionally “emptying” entire prisons of inmates.<sup>27</sup> Sometimes the Chekists did not even bother to waste the bullets, as in the Kholmogory camp, where bound prisoners were drowned in the nearby river.<sup>28</sup> In June 1918 the public was notified that in case of a single shot at the Bolshevik supporters in Astrakhan’ “bourgeois hostages” will be executed “in 24 minutes.”<sup>29</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Faced with a wave of starving workers&#8217; strikes and peasant uprisings, the government directed its wrath against the very groups whose alleged, if more than questionable, backing had served as an argument for the Bolsheviks´ political legitimacy. In two months of terror, between 10,000 and 15,000 summary executions took place, marking “a radical break with the practices of the Tsarist regime.”  In almost 100 years, between 1825 and 1917, the imperial courts issued 6,321 politics-related death sentences, not all of which were carried out.<sup>30</sup> As we have seen, before the revolution, the terrorists came to be responsible for exactly as many casualties among state officials in a single decade, invalidating a claim that “violence, alas, was reciprocal.”<sup>31</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Alienation and anxiety, so prominent in the clandestine milieu, seem to have been even more pronounced when the extremists usurped power in Russia.  Escalating brutality of the extremist clique that came to exercise tenuous control over the enormous country bore a concomitant&#8211;and mounting&#8211;dread of criminals before imminent retribution.  Few, if any among the Bolshevik leadership believed that their regime would outlast the two-month revolutionary experience of the Paris Commune; yet, all were determined to hold on to power at any cost—for as long as possible, until they would surely be overthrown and again forced into a position of haunted runaways.<sup>32</sup> Psychologically, they had not changed from the underground days when, perceiving themselves as the persecuted, liable for annihilation, the radicals propelled onto the enemy their fear and belligerence.  In fact, as their “power increased, so did the Bolshevik sense of danger,” perception of a looming catastrophe, and urgency to harm.  “We have never made a secret of the fact that our revolution is only the beginning, that its victorious end will only come when we have lit up the whole world with these same flames,” said Trotsky, anticipating the millennial cataclysm&#8211;from Hungary to India.  Having declared ruthless war on the international bourgeoisie, Lenin avowed that the wounded “wild beast” is bursting with “fierce hate . . . and ready to throw itself at Soviet Russia any minute to strangle it.”<sup>33</sup> And if in the 1905 era the extremists did not shun from victimizing people they were allegedly liberating; as government, they did so with redoubled intensity.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Psychologist Karen Horney described the tendency to dominate “disguised in humanistic forms,” as well as the quest for power as a protection.  It is “born out of anxiety” associated with feelings of inferiority, weakness, and helplessness&#8211;glaring among the extremists.  It has an additional benefit “as a channel through which repressed hostility can be discharged”<sup>34</sup> Finally, it “strengthens group identity, since the hated other can be collectively shared and collectively destroyed.”  The group then “comes to see itself as exclusive, possessing a boundary the hated other may never pass or threaten . . . the border separates the pure from the impure . . . the polluted from the good,” the saints from the villains.<sup>35</sup> The dualistic, black-and-while formula that all goodness is within, and all badness is outside inevitably had to translate into violence, in accordance with Lenin’s challenge:  “each man must choose between joining our side or the other side”<sup>36</sup> Like other variants of totalism, Bolshevism presumed the impossibility of a “third path” or neutrality:<sup>37</sup> “One who does not sing along with us today is against us,” first official Soviet poet Vladimir Maiakovskii, eulogized Lenin’s reprisals.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Repressions against other political parties began as early as 28 November 1917 with the ban of the Kadets.  Still supporting a parliamentary democracy, and still not realizing that the dream was over, they were the first among the liberal public intellectuals to pay for their collaboration with the extremists, who now declared them enemies of the people.  From then on, Kadet publications were closed and supporters arrested.  Lenin’s excuse—which he offered to simulate at least a minimal legitimacy—was that the Constitutional Democrats were not socialists.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">In June 1918 the Bolshevik barred the SRs and the Mensheviks from the political process for alleged counterrevolutionary activities, and by late summer Lenin was already applying terror against former socialist comrades, many of whom were apprehended and incarcerated.   Of course they were not counterrevolutionaries, Lenin frankly admitted to Swiss socialist Fritz Platten, &#8220;But that&#8217;s exactly why they are dangerous&#8211;just because they are honest revolutionists.&#8221;<sup>38</sup> Long before the Soviets legalized the on-going practice in their Penal Code, persecution extended from renowned figures of the socialist opposition to members of their families, including children.  The youngest daughter of Chernov, leader of the now-outlawed SRs, was eleven years old when she spent weeks of semi-starvation in an icy cell of the infamous Lubianka prison.<sup>39</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">In the first months after the Bolshevik takeover, Lenin had no choice but to put aside his dream of a single-party regime and grudgingly acknowledged the necessity to allot fractional authority to radical dissenters from the PSR&#8211;Left Socialists-Revolutionaries (Left SRs).  The Bolsheviks invited them to join the coalition government, in which the Left SR received four Commissar positions.  They also held high posts within the Soviet repressive organs, including the Cheka, where a Left SR representative served as its deputy director.  In their effort to eradicate “counterrevolution,” the Left SR were no less extreme than their comrades, the Bolsheviks.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">On July 6, 1918, two Cheka functionaries, Left SRs Iakov Blumkin and Nikolai Andreev, assassinated the German Ambassador in Moscow, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach.  Lenin immediately proclaimed the terrorist act to be not only an attempt to drag the Soviet Republic into a new war with Germany, but also a motion for a full-fledged “counterrevolutionary uprising.”  He proceeded to arrest approximately 450 members of the Left SR faction on charges of conspiracy and treacherous violation of the two-party alliance.  Most likely, the Left SR leadership, although yielding none to the Bolsheviks in extremism, had no intention of rebelling against the coalition, but Mirbach’s assassination did give Lenin an opportunity to provoke the exchange of fire between former partners and to fulfill his underlying purpose of establishing the Bolshevik dictatorship.<sup>40</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">At the other end of the world nearly a century later, the extremists are following similar patterns of eliminating political rivals.  On 25 July 2008, an explosive device detonated in Gaza outside the Hilal Café, frequented by leading Hamas activists.  The explosion occurred next to a vehicle belonging to the militants´ commander Nihad Masbah.  Along with him, the blast killed four of his comrades and a 4-year-old girl; over twenty others were wounded.  Against all expectations, the Hamas leadership did not blame Israel and instead assigned responsibility for the attack to Muhammad Dahlan, former PA Authority National Security Advisor under the Fatah Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.  Following the explosion, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyah vowed to “seek justice” and punish all guilty.  Abbas repeatedly denied the allegation that Fatah was behind the terrorist act in Gaza and proposed to initiate an independent inquiry to investigate the bombing—offer Hamas promptly rejected.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Instead, the Hamas combatants immediately began to make arrests throughout the city, apprehending 160 people aligned with al Fatah.  The arrests set off a wave of fighting between Hamas and Fatah factions.  Over the next two days, Hamas continued its repressive operations in Gaza, arresting in total almost 200 Fatah activists.  Fatah retaliated:  <em>The Jerusalem Post</em> reported that its forces rounded up dozens of pro-Hamas politicians and sympathizers across the West Bank, including 54 people in Nablus.  On 28 July Hamas banned the distribution of three Fatah-affiliated newspapers and arrested some journalists.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">It was not the first or the only time Hamas combatants set out against the Fatah membership.  On 17 June 2009, Fatah TV marked the second anniversary of the Hamas military takeover of Gaza by issuing a graphic video, featuring  a screaming Fatah activist, drugged along on the ground and beaten by Hamas fighters with a bone-crushing bat, incited by their comrades with screams “Allahu Akbar” (Allah is Great).<sup>41</sup> It would be fair to state—which the video did not—that in the areas controlled by Fatah, its militants have treated the Hamas rivals in similar ways.<sup> 42</sup> For the Fatah leaders “nemeses were neither the Jews nor their Zionist benefactors” but “brother Palestinians,” men who repudiated allegiance to the faction that claimed the right to Arafat’s political legacy.<sup>43</sup></p>
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