Here’s a story every American should hear — the Gaza woman who twice received extensive life-saving care from Israel, obtained her education through Israel, and then returned to blow up the hospital that saved her life. And she told an American journalist that she would attempt another terrorist attack in a heartbeat if she could.
Westerners tend to be cultural imperialists, which means that they make the false assumption that the overwhelming majority of human beings have basically the same goals and standards and want the same outcomes. The number of egregiously stupid mistakes that American politicians, for instance, have made because they refuse to acknowledge that Communist and Islamic regimes don’t value the lives or prosperity of their people is appalling.
Even the new America-brokered deal pressed on Israel that would require the release of hundreds of Gaza jihadists — Oct. 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar was previously released through just such a deal — does not seem to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of the so-called Palestinians fanatically and fundamentally believe they must wipe Israel off the map for Allah. They are taught that from school, the media, and mosques from the youngest ages. As long as Gaza exists as a Muslim-run territory, Israel will be fighting off terror attacks.
But Sinwar was only one of about a thousand Gazans traded back in a deal for a single Israeli hostage, just as the brand new deal would release around 2,000 Gazans in exchange for the nearly 50 Israeli hostages. Among the other Gazans in the Sinwar deal was Wafa, an attempted suicide bomber who targeted the very Israeli hospital that had saved her life. It is not clear if he was referring to the woman below or a different bomber of the same name:
Back in 2012, Leland Vittert told The Free Press’s Bari Weiss that he was a foreign correspondent for Fox News. He described how normal it was as a Middle Eastern correspondent to have to cover suicide bombings against Israel and riots in the “West Bank,” which is the Palestinian propaganda term for the Israeli land the Bible calls Judea and Samaria. But the Obama-backed “Arab Spring” that gave birth to so many Islamic terrorist movements had been occupying his time.
“There'd been a couple Gaza skirmishes,” Vittert remembered, and of course, terrorist attacks never stop, “but there was the Gilad Shalit deal, where there was an Israeli soldier who had been held hostage and traded from Gaza to Israel for [over] 1,000 Gaza prisoners, including Sinwar and including a woman named Wafa.”
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When Wafa was a little girl, Vittert continued, she “pulled a pot of boiling water over herself” and “the Israelis treat most of the people out of Gaza who have really horrific burns, catastrophic medical injuries. She goes back to Gaza after being treated for four or five years in Israel, but has a pass to get in and out of Israel, which very few people in Gaza did at the time. So she gets recruited to be a suicide bomber. This is in the Second Intifada, so mid-2000s.”
One feature of that conflict was the number of children and teens Palestinians used as suicide bombers. Vittert recalled, “There's the video of her coming to the checkpoint to get into Israel wearing her suicide vest, and she had been given three target options by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade: a bus, a cafe, or the hospital that had treated her and saved her life. She chose the hospital that had treated her and saved her life.” Israel, America, and other countries have been trying to pretend that giving the so-called Palestinians excessive amounts of aid and more land grants will make them grateful and happy. It doesn’t because the Muslims fundamentally believe it is necessary for them to wipe out the world’s only Jewish nation.
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Vittert went on, “She gets to the checkpoint, they discover that she has a bomb, or they think she does. She tries to detonate it. It doesn't go off. She gets thrown in jail again. The Israelis treat her, they help her with her burns, they educate her, they give her a college degree.”
Was Wafa repentant? No. “And now in the Gilad Shalit deal, she goes back to Gaza,” Vittert said. “So I go to Gaza to interview her, thinking this is going to be a redemption story. It was before Christmas, right? That she is going to say … ‘I am going to be the one to try and forge peace. And I believe in peace, and I've seen that the Israelis are not evil, that I don't want to kill them anymore.’”
But that cultural imperialist mindset suffered a rude reality check, according to Vittert himself. “I get into Gaza, and I bring with me an iPad that has the video of her trying to blow herself up. So we're sitting across from each other like this. She's wearing a hijab in a very junky Gazan apartment, it is an awful place in every sense of the word. And I show her the video, and I said, ‘What are you thinking watching this?’ She goes, ‘oh, oh, oh,’ has all this reaction… She goes, ‘I'm thinking I almost tasted paradise.’”
Stunned, Vittert asked her, “Okay, would you do it again?” Wafa promptly responded, “‘Absolutely, in a minute. This is my calling in life.’ I said, ‘Wait a second. These people treated you and all of your burns, they saved your life. You tried to blow them up. They still treated you, they educated you, and now you have a chance at life back here in Gaza, and you'd want to blow them up?’ She goes, ‘absolutely, they are the infidels. They are evil. They are the enemy.’ I can't remember what the exact translation was, [but] that's when my mind was made up about sort of the moral clarity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Vittert ended. “Are the Israelis perfect? No, but that's what they're up against.”
Notably, more than one former hostage of the current conflict testified that not a single Gazan civilian tried to help them, and in some cases, mobs of Gazans tried to attack them and kill them.
The ugly and bloody truth of Islam is that its adherents are taught from the time they can speak that killing Jews and Christians, by whatever method and for any reason, is a fast pass to paradise. And unfortunately, every time Israel makes a deal to release jihadis in exchange for a handful of Israelis, they release the very terrorists who will come back and heartlessly kill more Israelis.
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