SOP for ROP (redux)

Last year I published a post titled “SOP for ROP” on my old blog. I am re-posting it here since the topic of the essay is once again in the news today with the story from Iraq about an eight- year-old girl being rigged with explosives and remote- detonated by the usual insurgents in order to assassinate an Iraqi commander. I’ve read lots of comments around the Internet about the story, and it’s pretty obvious to me that most folks are completely unaware how common this specific atrocity is in jihadi practice. Even Robert Spencer, who has covered this sort of thing numerous times and whom I in fact quote in the original post, saw today’s news as rather extraordinary. He started his coverage off by stating, “The lovers of death achieve a new low.”

But it’s really just the same old low we’ve seen time and again. The occasion for the original post was the remote detonation in Baghdad of what were reported at the time to be two developmentally disabled Iraqi women. I took the title from a comment by Hugh Fitzgerald on the Jihad Watch story at that time.

Photo by Max Novikov.

SOP for ROP

Today’s rather shocking news about two developmentally disabled female suicide bombers in Baghdad shouldn’t come as any big surprise. As Hugh Fitzgerald notes, this incident is Muslim “standard operating procedure,” but even the erudite Fitzgerald may not realize to what extent. Not at all shocked himself, Mr. Fitzgerald goes on to remind us that we’ve all heard about this type of barbaric behavior before and that Muslim women are utilized by the jihadists as human cannon fodder “all the time. Or at least [Muslim terrorists] have tried. Often the Israelis, sensing what is to come, have managed to defuse the mindless time-bomb and save the innocent would-be mass-murderer’s life.” Robert Spencer was similarly unfazed, submitting in a previous story on Jihad Watch that “there have been reports that at least some… female bombers, if not the ones involved in these Baghdad attacks, are women who have come to be considered as having sullied the family’s purity, and as such, their surest path to Paradise is to take hold of Allah’s guarantee of it to those who “kill and are killed” for him (Qur’an 9:111). And that promise, of course, may be attractive also to those who do not otherwise face immediate death.”

Indeed, apparently it is attractive to many. The film Obsession includes a rare clip of an astonishingly large graduation class of suicide bombers dressed to the teeth in ceremonial IED. While the general public is shocked and those in the know about radical Islam yawn, Muslims all over are popping up to instruct us that today’s violence has nothing to do with Islam. Muslim apologists on various blogs even openly challenge the news reports. The whole story was made up by anti-Muslim bigots to discredit Islam by once again associating it with stark terror. I’ve been working all day but monitoring the chatter to see if anyone anywhere was making a link to what was on my mind: that is, the shahidka (Russian feminine derivative variant of shahid, literally “witness” but synonymous with “martyr”) at the Beslan school siege and also at the Russian theatre massacre, and the evidence that these notable shahidka were remote-detonated, as were the “crazy ladies” in today’s news report.

According to Russian journalist Julia Jusik (photo above) the “black widows” (as they sometimes were called in Russian news reports) are recruited or forced into service under exploitive conditions similar to those to which Robert Spencer alludes. They are sold by their families or kidnapped outright to become shahidka, but no matter how enlisted, they generally appear to some extent duped, as the shahidka at Beslan clearly were, since they strongly objected when they became aware their target victims were innocent Russian children. But even the shahidka who “join up” are seldom committed to blowing themselves up for the cause, Jusik says. These are girls prepared for martyrdom through violence, rape, drugs, and more violence. They’re often pregnant or at least “sullied,” as Spencer has it, or they are in ill health or developmentally disabled. As seen in today’s news, as well as in some of the landmark atrocities of the ongoing jihad, often there’s no suicide about female suicide bombers, who are regularly remote-detonated to ensure victory in Allah’s name.

It’s entirely revolting, but not at all surprising. It’s not even shocking any longer.

It’s just standard operating procedure for the religion of peace.