Iranian state television recently broadcast an animated film that glorifies suicide bombings against Israelis. The cartoon portrays the actions of a young Palestinian boy who kills himself to strike back against Israelis as a noble example for children to follow. The boy straps himself with grenades and blows himself up after being told: "Go and show the Zionists how brave and heroic are the children of Palestine."
Iranian state television broadcast the cartoon around the same time that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Israel should be "wiped off the map." The Iranian clerical regime's glorification of suicide bombing comes at a time when Muslims throughout the world are rejecting terrorism. The democratically elected Palestinian Authority, which unlike Iran, actually speaks for Palestinians, has strongly condemned suicide bombings.
Following the November 9th suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman, Jordan, that killed sixty people, thousands of Jordanians marched in demonstrations denouncing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, which claimed responsibility for the blasts. In July of this year, one hundred seventy of the world's leading Muslim clerics and scholars gathered in Amman, where they issued a joint fatwa denouncing all acts of terrorism committed in the name of Islam. In Indonesia, Din Syamsuddin, the head of Muhammadiyah, Indonesia's second largest Islamic organization, said it is "absolutely wrong to connect suicide bombings with Islam since those terrorist actions have besmirched Muslims."
President George W. Bush says that like other totalitarians, radical Islamic leaders believe that innocent individuals can be sacrificed to serve their warped political vision:
"Islamic radicalism is elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the Muslim masses. Bin Laden says his own role is to tell Muslims, 'what is good for them and what is not.' And what this man who grew up in wealth and privilege considers good for poor Muslims is that they become killers and suicide bombers. He assures them...that this is the road to paradise - though he never offers to go along for the ride."
Islamic radicalism will ultimately fail, says President Bush, because "those who despise freedom and progress have condemned themselves to isolation and decline and collapse."
The preceding was an editorial reflecting the views of the United States Government.
