One More Innocent Child?

Jonathan Kay: New levels of evil, and apathy, when Mommy's a suicide bomber

Posted: April 30, 2009

On April 17, 1986, a pregnant Irish chambermaid named Anne Mary Murphy presented herself at London’s Heathrow Airport, an El Al plane ticket to Tel Aviv in hand. Her ultimate destination was Jordan, where she planned to meet the family of her fiancé, a journalist named Nezar Hindawi.

Murphy never made it on the plane. El Al security agents searching her luggage found disguised Semtex explosives connected to a calculator that Hindawi had fashioned into a bomb trigger. If his plot had succeeded, more than 360 people would have died — including his (unwitting) girlfriend and unborn baby. A judge later described the Syrian-backed crime — for which Hindawi is serving a 45-year jail sentence — as “about as foul and as horrible a crime as could possibly be imagined.”

Which goes to show how little imagination we infidels had back then. Here is the lead paragraph of an article from last Friday’s New York Times: “BAGHDAD — At least 80 people died … in three bombings, one by a female suicide bomber in Baghdad who, Iraqi officials said, held a young child’s hand as she set off her explosives among a group of women and children receiving emergency food aid.”

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