Music Video Explores a Suicide Bomber as a Mother

March 24th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker

In the above al-Aqsa TV music video, which I found via ReligionNewsBlog (see the original Ynet story here), the daughter of suicide bomber Reem Riyashi sings to her mother, as Riyashi carries out a suicide attack.

The daughter is initially scared, “Mommy, what are you carrying in your arms instead of me. A toy or a present for me? Mommy Reem! Why did you put on your veil? Are you going out, mommy? … Come back quickly mommy. I can’t sleep without you, unless you tell me and Ubaydah a bedtime story.”

But after seeing her mom on TV, the daughter changes her tune: “Instead of me you carried a bomb in your hands. Only now, I know what was more precious than us. May your steps be blessed, and may you be flawless for Jerusalem. Send greetings to our messenger Muhammad.”

And finally, the girl decides herself to become a bomber, as she finds explosives in her mother’s drawer and says, “My love will not be (merely) words. I am following mommy in her steps.”

I think a music video aimed at turning children into suicide bombers is exploitive and sick, but the video does grapple with the difficult question of motherhood and sacrifice. The Ynet article is titled “Bombs more precious than children,” which is the mother’s implied decision, though it is the child who realizes that she is less important than the bomb; her mother never reflects upon it.

The responses on Ynet centered on the video’s sick nature. “Palestinians will never, ever have peace as long as their culture and society thinks this way,” said one. Another added, “This is the path of the dark forces that will one day end up in the Lake of Fire.” Another, calling him/herself cato the younger, wrote, “Too sick. This proves once and for all, that there can never, ever be a so-called ‘Palestinian State.’ Anyone who still indulges him/herself in this fantasy is perhaps, as distorted in their thinking as the people who put the little child up to this.”

“Yisraeli” got racist:

Were dealing with a real group soul of Amalek here and you know what the Bible says about them and what to do with them. Once they sacrificed children to Moloch now to some Allah, all still the same. Hatred not just for jews but even for those amongst themselves is burned so deep and it has nothing to do with your so called “occupation”, nothing whatsoever. They have removed themselves from any normal civilised behaviour. Barbarism has become an under statement of them. And I accept that its not all of them, yet the silence of the good ones has now made it all part of their neanderthall culture. Theyre isnt a place for them on earth, maybe only up there with theyre mohammed and so called allah.

But I found a post by a Josh to be most interesting. “And what makes someone become like this? Israelis need to answer that question. 60 years of occupation has come to bear fruit now!”

Within the logic of the video, something changes in the child which allows her natural feelings of love for her mother and fear and longing in her absence to turn to love for the cause for which her mother sacrificed herself. Children, certainly not children that age, are not able to learn that lesson. That perspective is the domain of much older people, who are able to weigh their own selfishness (not in a bad way, in an aware way) with a larger cause. This is ultimately why the video is propaganda, but there is something very powerful within the logic of the video where the child understands that there are larger things than she, even to her mother.

If this movie is simply propaganda, it is quite gutsy and courageous to even raise the idea that suicide bombers have children who might be much worse off for their mother’s actions.

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