CHILD MARTYRS OF ISLAM
FROM THE NEW YORK SUN:
By HEATHER ROBINSON
June 1, 2007
Like many people, Brooke Goldstein couldn't understand why Palestinian Arab terrorists recruited children to become murderers, so she went to the West Bank and asked them, Heather Robinson writes.
In 2004, 24-year-old Brooke Goldstein spent her summer in the West Bank filming more than five hours of in-person interviews with terrorists — all of which she conducted without a bodyguard and without a weapon. A Cardozo Law student with a fashion model's high cheekbones and long blond hair, Ms. Goldstein came face-to-face with Zacaria Zubeidah, a notorious recruiter of child suicide bombers. She interviewed suicide bombers' families and children, who aspire to "martyrdom." The resulting film, "The Making of a Martyr," will screen as part of the Brooklyn International Film Festival on Saturday and Tuesday.
Ms. Goldstein only appears in the film from the back; the focus is on Palestinian Arabs. Shots of refugee camps in Nablus, Jenin, and other towns show children playing, sometimes amid remains of buildings and the detritus of gunfights.
In the interviews, parents of suicide bombers sit in living rooms adorned with posters of their dead, and teenage terrorists sit with their hands tensely gripping machine guns that rest against their knees as they answer Ms. Goldstein's questions.
Ms. Goldstein was inspired to do the project after reading a news story in 2004 about Hussam Abdu, a 16-year-old would-be suicide bomber who had a sudden change of heart and surrendered at an Israeli checkpoint. The image of the boy, with his hands above his head as frightened Israeli soldiers shouted orders, haunted her. She approached the problem like the aspiring lawyer she was.
"I was thinking, ‘You know, there's a legal argument here that no one is making, which is that the suicide bomber himself — 18 and under — is as much a victim as the Israeli civilians being killed,'" she said. "These kids are not doing this of their own accord."
Pleas read the entire disgusting expose.