You don't like that? How about this? Ah, what it must be like to have such leadership. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Mad]" src="mad-flaming.gif" />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/15/international/middleeast/15SUIC.html" target="_blank">http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/15/international/middleeast/15SUIC.html</a>
In Interview, Arafat's Wife Praises Suicide Bombings
By JUDITH MILLER
WASHINGTON, April 14 — Before Yasir Arafat condemned "terror against civilians" on Saturday, his wife, Suha al-Taweel Arafat, told an Arabic-language magazine that she endorsed suicide attacks as legitimate resistance against Israeli occupation.
In an interview published Friday in Al Majalla, a London-based, Saudi-owned weekly, Mrs. Arafat said that if she had a son, there would be "no greater honor" than to sacrifice him for the Palestinian cause.
"Would you expect me and my children to be less patriotic and more eager to live than my countrymen and their father and leader who is seeking martyrdom?" she was quoted as saying.
Mrs. Arafat has a daughter, not a son, and according to Israeli and Palestinian officials, both she and her daughter have been living in Paris, far from Israel's counterinsurgency campaign against Palestinians that began two weeks ago.
Henry Siegman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has promoted peace between Israelis and Arabs for almost four decades, said today, "When I hear a woman of Suha Arafat's intelligence, culture and standing in the Palestinian community condone suicide attacks, I fear that for Israelis and Palestinians the goal is no longer security or the creation of a state, but vengeance."
Mrs. Arafat's words, coupled with the carefully balanced condemnation of terrorism that her husband issued in Ramallah, reflect the mixed messages that have been coming out of Arab capitals as governments try to balance the need to react to popular anger against their own diplomatic priorities.
Mrs. Arafat's comments also reflect the hardening position of Arab leaders on suicide bombing, with prominent religious figures now expressing support for the practice.
Two of Egypt's most senior government-appointed religious scholars have endorsed suicide attacks.
Sheik Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, the top scholar of Al Azhar University in Cairo, said on Friday that all Israelis — men, women and children — were "forces of occupation," according to a translation of the statement by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a translation service in Washington that opposes the militants. Therefore, the sheik said, "martyrdom operations" were the "highest form of jihad operations."
According to the institute's translation, the sheik added that suicide attacks were "an Islamic commandment until the people of Palestine regain their land and cause the cruel Israeli aggression to retreat."
Today he amended those remarks to advise that no Muslim blow himself up "in the midst of children or women, but among aggressors, among soldiers."
At an inter-faith conference in Alexandria only a few weeks ago he urged tolerance and cooperation among Muslims, Christians and Jews.
The sheik's comments on suicide attacks were seconded by another of Egypt's most senior Islamic voices — Dr. Ahmad Al Tayyeb, the newly appointed mufti, Egypt's highest religious jurist.
Sheik Tayyeb, who once avoided discussing suicide bombings, declared that, "the solution to the Israeli terror" lies in a proliferation of suicide attacks "that strike horror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah." according to the research institute. "The Islamic countries, peoples and rulers alike, must support these martyrdom attacks."
Fouad Ajami, the author and professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, bemoaned the religious establishment's endorsement of what he called a "culture of terror."
"A terrible malignancy has been unleashed," Mr. Ajami wrote last week in a commentary in U.S. News and World Report.
Mr. Siegman, of the Council on Foreign Relations, said, "Left to their own devices these two peoples may not only destroy each other, but do far greater damage to the region and the international community."
Mr. Siegman, who endorsed a Saudi peace plan as the basis for negotiations, said it was an "illusion" to believe that Egypt or Saudi Arabia could "return their people to sanity."
![[Image: powell-palestine.jpg]](http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/images/powell-palestine.jpg)
