Hi fashionistas! It’s spring and also... it’s fashion week here in the Middle East!

What’s the smart youngster wearing around town these days?

Why, it’s the very fashionable explosive vest!

Great for making a statement at parties, or even when you’re just hanging around with friends, and oh-so-perfect for those moments when you come upon a nasty old checkpoint.



Well there are two side to every story:

“Hussam left home this morning to school, and this was the first we hear of what happened,” Tamam Abdu told Reuters from the family home in Nablus, just north of Hawara. “This is shocking. To use a child like this is irresponsible, forbidden.”

There was no claim of responsibility for Abdu’s mission from the slew of militant groups waging a Palestinian uprising that erupted in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in September 2000.

...and then on the other side...

“We know for sure this is a fabricated story from A to Z. Would you believe that a 13 or 14-year old would agree to blow up himself in return for a hundred shekels which he would receive after his death?”

...Samir Khiwairah, a Nablus journalist who personally knows the boy’s family, told Aljazeera.net that the boy’s mental capacity to distinguish things is very low.

“I don’t completely rule out the possibility that some evil person gave him the explosive belt and told him he would become a hero... but this is a very tiny possibility.”

The kid did have a ‘dull’ look on his face in the news piece I saw and looked like he might be ‘slow.’

Still, in the past, I do seem to remember a girl of nineteen getting on board a bus and detonating herself, leaving behind a tape in which she expressed her convictions about what she was doing.

There doesn’t seem to be such a large gap between a 14 and a 19 year old so, I couldn’t say I would be surprised the boy had been used to achieve such a nefarious goal.

What I don’t understand though, is how no one questions their own leadership? It’s great to be committed to a cause but, send your own children before you send the children of someone else to do such a thing. To do otherwise just doesn’t seem right.