PALESTINE'S PATHOLOGY :

The Most Wanted Palestinian (ELIZABETH RUBIN, June 30, 2002, NY Times Magazine)

''I've been in this business for 20 years,'' the officer said, ''and I've never encountered such a vicious and cruel terrorist as Qeis Adwan.''

It was an astonishing claim regarding such a young man barely out of college, given the long list of his predecessors--among them, Yahya Ayyash, the prototype of the Hamas ''engineer'' (typically a bomb maker with an engineering degree) and originator of Hamas's suicide bombers.

The Shin Bet officer shook his head. Ayyash had a family, he said, but Adwan had no personal life whatsoever--no wife, no interest in his family. He was, he said, a ''terror machine.'' [...]

Over the two days I spent in the Jenin camp, I watched and occasionally talked to a 13-year-old girl who was staying with Jamal's family because her house had been destroyed and her father killed. She had an encyclopedic brain and an uncanny memory. She remembered what I wore in the camp a month before, though we had never met. She remembered conversations with her father from eight years ago and knew what all the politicians were saying or had said. She never smiled and told me that her father wanted her to be a doctor. She said she would prefer to study nuclear physics so she could blow up America. ''When someone comes to fight you in your home, you have to fight him back, isn't that true?'' she asked.

Of course, these are the words of an angry, hurt child. But in the mind of Serraj, the psychiatrist in Gaza, they may express a potentially terrifying illness, the fruits of 15 years of unending violence. ''We have seen the children of the first intifada become suicide bombers,'' he had said. ''You only have to wait and see these children of today, what kind of horror they will bring to the world.''

After reading this chilling piece it's awfully hard to argue with John Ashcroft's assessment : "Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you." Posted by Orrin Judd at June 28, 2002 9:36 PM