The New York Times wrote about a wannabe suicide bomber who is now purportedly dedicated to “peace.”
She knew that once she put on the explosive belt, there would be no turning back. She knew it would rip her limb from limb, reducing her to a bloody pulp. She knew it would leave her only daughter an orphan.
But she also knew this: It would kill Israelis. With luck, a lot of them. And that was reason enough to do it.
Shifa al-Qudsi was a suicide bomber, or at least tried to be. A Palestinian hairdresser driven to anger, despair and hopelessness, she volunteered to carry out an attack on Israelis that would strike a blow, she thought, for her beleaguered people. “I wanted to seek revenge,” she said.
But she was arrested before she could act and today, after six years in an Israeli prison, Ms. Qudsi has transformed herself from a would-be deliverer of death into a messenger of peace. Now working with a group that brings Palestinians and Israelis together to advocate an end to the conflict between their peoples, she tries to channel the rage that took her to the brink into a nonviolent movement for change.
…“I don’t feel bad that I made that decision,” she said of her brush with death. “But now I reject suicide attacks. God decides when we will live and when we will die. Now my jihad is to send out a message to the world. The world must know the Palestinians’ land is occupied. We are people who want peace, just peace.”
She wants peace? Great! So do I! But what is her definition of peace?
We find out when she answers critics from the Arab side that she is guilty of “normalization:”
If viewed warily by the Israeli authorities, Ms. Qudsi is not accepted by everyone at home either. Palestinian attackers are celebrated in the West Bank as martyrs, and their families receive compensation from the Palestinian Authority. Cooperation with Israelis, even like-minded ones, is often deemed betrayal.“The Palestinian people have lost hope and don’t believe that peace with the Israelis will ever be achieved,” said Mahmoud Mubarak, president of the Jalazoun refugee camp council. “Many Palestinians consider the participation in joint projects with Israelis as normalization.”
Normalization refers to making the current situation better rather than seeking to overturn it altogether.
No, that is not what normalization means. The specific BDS definition of normalization is “[the] means to participate in any project or initiative or activity, local or international, specifically designed for gathering (either directly or indirectly) Palestinians (and/or Arabs) and Israelis, whether individuals or institutions; that does not explicitly aim to expose and resist the occupation and all forms of discrimination and oppression against the Palestinian people.”
In other words, any activity that treats Israeli Jews as anything other than evil is forbidden as “normalization.”
Omar Barghouti, a founder of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, called B.D.S., which targets Israel internationally, said the ostensible neutrality of groups like Combatants for Peace actually cemented the occupation.
“Joining normalization groups like Combatants for Peace is certainly not the answer; it aggravates the problem,” he added. “Normalizing Israeli apartheid only entrenches it.”
In an interview in a cafe one morning this fall, Ms. Qudsi denied enabling the occupation. “I’m against normalization. We are all against normalization, even this group,” she said. “There’s a huge difference.”
So Ms. Qudsi’s insistence that she, and Palestinians altogether, want “peace” is an obvious lie. She says that even Combatants for Peace is against normalization, agreeing that Israel is uniquely evil and Israelis must be shunned unless they spend 100% of their time supporting Palestinians who consider talking to normal Israelis as forbidden.
When Israelis talk peace, they mean that they want a comprehensive, real peace where both sides can become friendly and work together. When Palestinians like Qudsi says she wants peace, she means a world where Jews have no political power and no rights as a people.
It is a bit of a difference.
But the New York Times cannot seem to grasp that fundamental difference of definitions as they call Qudsi, without qualification, a “messenger of peace.”
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