The 11-year-old, a sixth grader from Shuafat, is the youngest assailant arrested to date in the current upsurge of Palestinian terrorism. He is too young to face charges under current Israeli law; the 14-year-old is facing charges of attempted murder.
In their interrogation, the two children said they carried out the attack as an act of revenge, without planning in advance and with no encouragement from any adults.
“We travelled from Shuafat to Damascus Gate in order to stab a soldier but did not do it because the soldiers were in groups and we didn’t find one standing alone,” recalled the 11-year-old. “Then he told me ‘let’s do an attack together to revenge the death of Muhammad Ali.’ He opened his bag and showed me the knife. At Damascus Gate I bought a pair of scissors and then we boarded the light rail and looked for Jews to stab.”
Two light rail security guards boarded the train, but the boys decided “not to stab them because there were two of them. Later on one of them got off and we immediately attacked the one that remained.”
“I stabbed him in his head, my cousin stabbed him in his chest and stomach until the guard pushed me and fired three bullets in my stomach,” said the 11-year-old.
The two cousins had decided they were ready to die as shahids, or martyrs, he said.
I have yet to find a single article in Palestinian media that shows the slightest regret that they have raised a generation of children who literally want to die for a chance to kill a Jew.
Think about that. Not a single Palestinian adult is willing to publicly express anything negative about children being brainwashed to die.
The children listen to music that extols death. They watch videos making murderers and even those who die failing to murder into heroes. Their teachers tell them that there is no higher calling than to be a martyr. Their preachers preach hate for Jews. Their newspapers publish cartoons that incite stabbings. Their friends brag about how they manage to throw rocks at soldiers.
But the worst part is not the hate and the incitement and the antisemitism. The worst part is the fact that there are no Palestinians willing to publicly say, in Arabic, that this is disgusting.
There is no debate about whether it is a good or bad thing for children to put themselves in danger to stab Jews. On the contrary - there are football tournaments named after the stabber children.
In the past eight weeks of reading Palestinian Arab media from all political viewpoints I have yet to find anyone who is willing to say anything negative about a culture that literally raises children to kill.
Not that every Palestinian parent supports their kids going off with the family knives to stab anyone with a kipah. Surveys show that roughly half are against violence and I have no reason to doubt them. But Palestinian society is set up in such a way that no one is willing to stand up and say the obvious - "We must stop raising our children on a steady diet of hate."
The apparent exceptions like Khaled Abu Toameh and Bassem Eid prove the rule. As far as I can tell they don't even bother to try to get their messages out in Arabic anymore because their words carry no weight within Palestinian society. Because they are wiling to take positions that are so obviously moral, they are ostracized, and as a result no one wants to join them for fear of being labeled a collaborator.
That is how a cult works - any independent thought that goes against the official line is silenced and the people behind it punished and blacklisted.
Palestinianism is a death cult.
If that statement is offensive to you, then kindly point me to the editorials or school curricula or cartoons or TV shows or music videos in Arabic that say that it is not a good idea to die while trying to murder Jews. I will happily retract and publish the articles that criticize a generation that glorifies death.
But you won't easily find them, because the such ideas cannot be safely said in Palestinian society.
The next issue is, why are so many Westerners coddling this death cult instead of criticizing it?
