An Unordinary Death: The Life Of A Suicide Bomber

I was told about this book by one of my readers and was encouraged to read this book. Actually the suggestion came from an American Jew and I was surprised to be encouraged to read such a book about such a sensative topic. What attracted me to read the book next is the positive reviews I read from Amazon.com & Barnes & Noble.

The story of "An Unordinary Death: The Life of a Suicide Bomber" is fiction, but the feelings, memories and sequence of events are built on real history and political situations making it hard to distinguish between fiction and reality.

The author of this book is "Khalilah" Christina Sabra who grew up in Southern California, where she converted to Islam. She studied Criminal Justice at California State University at Los Angeles and did her graduate work at UCLA in the field of Paralegal Studies. After teaching for several years she temporarily worked as a humanitarian relief worker in refugee camps in Afghanistan and taught English as a Second Language in Beirut, Lebanon. In the years since, she has worked with several civil rights organizations. She hopes that "An Unordinary Death" will not only reveal itself as a fictional work but as a tool of education. Click here to listen to the author talking about her book.

The Foreword of the book is written by Maj. Stav Adivi from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) reserves. He is a member of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and an active member in the Israeli Community of Human Rights. As a major in the IDF reserves he was one of the highest-ranking officers who signed the Combatants Letter of "Courage to Refuse". This letter declares the refusal to participate in the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian people in the territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Click here to watch an interview with Maj. Stav Adivi.

Maj. Stav Adivi says in the foreword, "An Unordinary Death may be fiction, but it is fact that all the years spent in social and political limbo with continious fighting and economic deprivation have brought this particular cluster of angry people to a chronic state of anxiety and aggression, and others to despair and hopelessness. Overcrowding, poor healthcare, lack of facilities for basic hygiene, continious hunger, and other depriviations worsen this horrible situation."

Overall, the book is worth reading to explore the mind of a Palastinian suicide bomber and what kind of life he/she is living as a part of this neglected and oppressed community in their own homeland.

Actually Ms. Khalilah Christina Sabra was kind enough to email me to describe to me her point of view of the Israeli-Palastinians conflict ...

The problem is seeded in the fact that for almost a half of a century there has been one continuous explanation after another in favor of Jewish aggression. Most of the discussion has been focused on, (1) a rationale for Israeli internal security; 2) American political interest, 3) or Israel being the only “democracy” existing in that area. Seldom, however, is the focus on the efficacious action of this “democracy” in maintaining a policy of ethnic cleansing of Arabs and preserving polarity between non-Jews by excessive use of force with the expressed goal of dominating and the hoarding of geographical advantages, while ignoring the fact that a real democracy does not display a gross indifference for human life. This kind of so-called defense and democracy sidesteps humanity and ethics, both, in their exact forms. Tagging the Israeli actions as defensive immediately extricates the executors from their actions that run counter to all acceptability and human propriety, and leaves the area wide open for blaming the victim for his own destruction . The actions of the Israelis, therefore, do not seem criminal, violent and unreasonable, nor does the loud violence of death, destruction and emotional misery. Sadly enough, all of it works in concert to create for those watching the bloodshed, a sense of justice and manageable acceptance of military exploitation. The conscience of our leaders are guilt free, along with our own, and we the citizens of this grand democracy can live within our shell, the cushioned casement that protect us from acute perceptions of the things we do not wish to understand. To ascribe the title of democracy to Israel, as it exists, is to utter a linguistic lie that despoils authenticity. Historically we have failed willingly and miserably to do real justice to the various concepts relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and now we do so with the horrific events that have transpired in Lebanon. If we were to analytically deconstruct the concept “terrorism” we might come to feel that we are debarred from being disturbed by resistance groups like Hezbollah. We might suddenly become horrified by missiles descending on civilians, decapitated children, and blood flowing beyond burned bodies. We may concede that it is Israel is capable from creating the same kind of aggression it was liberated from after World War II and that Palestinians and Lebanese alike are genuinely trying to escape from the insufferable feeling of authority and control by a government that uses a point in history to justify its unholy acts of war and anti-Semitism. It is the Arab neighbors of the Zionists and who are condemned by their ethnicity to be an unequal part, parceled into unsafe territories by an avowed enemy who seeks control with American made artillery and crudely flaunts its power of destruction. Wisdom must allow that there is no mechanistic submission to this kind of fate and we should not assume that Hezbollah should act a manner other than the course it is taking?

Ms. Khalilah Christina Sabra also described her point of view and reactions to the current war in Lebanon which she was lucky enough to be able to escape from few days ago ...

I cannot help but remember a Lebanese woman shrieking in a voice that echoed her recognition of the cold blooded murder of almost her entire family, which included four children and her husband, on the streets of Tyre. I think that same willingness to destroy civil life in Palestine has found it way back into Lebaonon. The hideous act of Israeli initiated terrorism has been a non-stop replay of shock and grief on every news channel, as the crimes against civilians are vividly described by the journalists who write daily about the relatives that mourn their dead or cry out for help for those who lay wounded on the streets. Death seems inevitable in an ill-fated process in which the deaths babies have become an acceptable norm for the Israelis who murder with malice; no matter how hard several governments have discouraged the murderous manifestation of Israeli bombs. From An Unordinary Death: [The Israeli leader will say] “The refugee camps are filled with vicious terrorists who wish to destabilize the government of Israel.” What he will not tell you, because he refuses to acknowledge it himself, is that the refugee camps are also filled with starving children, hopeless men and weeping women; they are full of illiterate orphans in Nablus, homeless families in Jenin and crippled people in Hebron. Sharon, consistent with his own racist, hard-line stance, has always refused to deal with their torment, their hunger or their hopelessness, but he would have to deal with the consequences of such torment, which might eventually lead to a bomb exploding inside a café across the street from his home, in the privileged, sheltered and segregated street in Tel Aviv. For those of you Israelis who are weak and feel powerless to change the direction of your government, there is something that you can do. When you pray to your God, I want you to ask him to help those who are less privileged than you, because you took everything away from them. You took from them indirectly if not directly. I want you to close your eyes and think of those who live in the West Bank and Gaza, within the hot and crowded refugee camps of Jenin and Khan Younis. Think about the children who go to sleep hungry and do not have warm clothes in the winter. I want you to feel remorse about the babies who have been blown away by your missiles or dismembered by your high tech weapons. The chances are that most of you will never know any of our children nor witness their tears. You will never observe the horror in their eyes when they see blood flowing from some part of their bodies and do not know why. And chances are that they will never know that you felt a little ashamed about the lives that they were forced to live. Never mind. There is something you can do. You can teach your children that it wrong to take or even accept what does not belong to them and to feel genuine concern about people who are oppressed and who are your victims. To the Americans, I wish to say that you live in an open and sometimes compassionate country, but which can also be murderous and aggressive. I know that some of your politicians will have you believe that we hate you, but we don’t. We only hate what you allow to be done to our people, what you allow your weapons of mass destruction to do to our homes and to the people that we love. We hate that your ears remain deaf when it comes to the voices of our dying. Worst of all, we hate the way that you’ve divorced yourselves from the ideals that you espouse from the behavior that you demonstrate when you give Sharon the military hardware he uses to kill us, even as we sleep. A long time ago we used to petition your leaders for some merciful intervention, but they refused us. Instead they answered our pleas by giving the Israelis even more sophisticated artillery, knowing that these weapons made for war would be used on civilians. Do you not see that you bear some of the responsibility for our man-made hell? When we asked for intervention, we were not asking you to help us; we were asking you to save our lives! You did the opposite! Yet, the majority of you believe that the United States is a “peace loving” country. Your president says it. Your constitution provides for it. Your people pledge themselves to it and feel at ease with the idea that this is true. So why did America sell weapons to a government that used them to kill off a selected part of its population and step on every part of our human decency? I will tell you why. You did it to protect your interest; so you made our country a fortress for the Israelis. For their protection you gave them your experts who pore over satellites twenty-four hours a day, looking to destroy the resistance. Just because your government decided to commit itself to the Israelis, it didn’t mean you had to shut up and salute. Doesn’t your constitution provide for your freedom of speech? Is there no public scrutiny over missiles falling on babies’ heads? Still you have not stopped us, even though both the American and Israeli governments thought that they had their feet solidly on our Palestinian necks.

Read Also:
Unordinary Death (91.5 WUNC FM)
An Unordinary Death...the Life of a Suicide Bomber (Amazon.com)
Interview with Israeli Refusenik Stav Adivi (Free Speech Network)