This is how Islam ends

This is how Islam ends

By Bradley Burston, Haaretz Correspondent

Tags: Burston, Berkeley Marines

This is how Islam ends.

It is Friday, the Muslim day of prayer. Two mentally disabled women are fitted with bomb belts. Their handlers hold the switches that will activate the remote controlled detonators affixed to the explosives.

One of the women is a familiar figure at the al-Ghazi pet bazaar, an open market in central Baghdad, where people come to buy and sell pigeons and other pets. The woman sells cream there in the mornings.

This Friday is an unusually beautiful morning. Clear skies after weeks of severe winter weather bring out large crowds, many out just for a stroll.

When her handler closes the switch, a horrifying blast rips through the market. The carnage in the blackened pools of blood strews and confuses human and animal remains. The woman, who may not have even known that she was wearing explosives, is one of 62 people killed in the smoke and the crushing shock wave and the fire and the shrapnel that are too fast to avoid.

This is how Islam ends. Twenty minutes later, a second switch is closed. The second woman, according to police a woman with Down Syndrome, has entered the bird market in New Baghdad, a mostly Shiite area in a southeastern section of the city. The explosion tears and chars her body to pieces and vapor. Thirty-six other people are dead. Another 56 are injured, many of them gravely maimed for life.

This is how Islam ends. This is the future according to Al Qaida. This is the real meaning of this World War III of our times: A war of Islamists against Islam itself.

This week, for the first time in more than a year, suicide bombers struck at Israel. Two bombers attacked the Negev town of Dimona, killing one woman and wounding at least 11 people.

In sheer numbers of attacks and tolls of innocent victims, however, the moral outrages committed by Al Qaida of late have overwhelmingly targeted Muslims and Muslim shrines.

It is a war of the self-styled devout against an Islam whose core precepts are meant to foster peace, self-discipline, respect for women, protection of the innocent and unfortunate. It is a war to the death. And Al Qaida is not the only assailant.