Three disturbing news reports crossed my desk recently, which, taken together, reveal anew the hostility of radical Islam toward the rights of women and children. The first was the widely reported story of two adult, male terrorists in Baghdad who drove through a checkpoint in a car with two young children in the back seat. Because of the children, they were waved through. Once on the other side, the two men got out of the car—leaving the boys inside—ran some distance away, and hit the detonator. They children were killed, along with one bystander.
According to the Washington Times, this use of children as camouflage or cat’s-paws has become routine. Al Qaeda in Iraq uses kidnapped children to pick up dropped weapons from battlefields because they know that U.S. soldiers won’t shoot at them. (Last year there was a period when using children with Down syndrome was the fashion.) I suppose we are not surprised by this sort of barbarity anymore. But we should be: Islam is not, by history or nature, a suicide cult. It is important to consider that people willing to do this to their own flesh and blood—for pretty meager tactical payoffs in terms of enemy dead—are not people who can co-exist with civilized society.
