Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Here's a gem culled straight from a book that came out last year called Modern Jihad - Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks by Loretta Napoleoni. A book, by the way, that received unequivocal endorsments from, among others, Henry Porter and Professor Paul Gilbert and Greg Palast and Noam Chomsky.

On the recruitment of young suicide bombers in the occupied Palestinian territories:

Overall, the most important cost is the compensation to the family for the loss of a loved one. How to quantify the life of a child? Impossible. In the occupied territories, families recieve about $ 30, 000 for each son or daughter's death from outside sponsors such as charitable organisations, groups of sympathisers or foreign regimes such as Saudi Arabia and until recently* that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Since compensation for families comes from money raised abroad, the organisers of the suicide missions do not have to fund it entirely by themselves.

*i.e. pre-war.