Remembering Amar, the man with down syndrome used by suicide bombers

"Down syndrome youth used as suicide bomber" is what the headline said. Apparently this young man, Amar, was a 19 year old Iraqui who was kidnapped rigged with bombs and sent to an area where people were being frisked before entering to vote. One report said he was to go to the checkpoint area, but went half way and then began to walk back toward the terrorists when they detonated the explosives. Another report says that he was "crossing open ground." A relative said, "They must have kidnapped him. He was like a baby. He had nothing to do with the resistance and there was nothing in the house for him to make a bomb. He was a Shiite. Why bomb his own people? He was mindless, but he was mostly happy, laughing and playing with the children in the street. Now his father is inconsolable; his mother cries all the time" (from The Age).

So now the terrorists have reached a new low in using cognitively impaired individuals like Amar to further their murderous agenda. It is one thing for a person to hold to a particular political agenda to the point of sacrificing his life for that agenda. It is another to take the lives of random others in one's self destruction. However, it is the depth of evil to take the life of someone who is oblivious to political maneuverings, oblivious about much of what is going on around him in the world even and sacrifice his life and those of random others.

It is my hope that the Muslim Arab world will see this murder of a man, a man innocent of political affiliation, at the hands of those who speak and act for "god" as the final proof positive that a political movement which would use blameless, naive persons with cognitive disability as the vehicle for murder needs to be removed from the face of the Earth.

I would like to think that Amar somehow figured out what was happening to him, and refused to be used in that manner. Many people like Amar that I have known would have acted with such courage.

McNair
(fcbu)