International Business Times reported Friday that
a French mother who named her son Jihad has reportedly been convicted by an appeals court in the city of Nimes, France, of “glorifying a crime” for sending the 3-year-old to school wearing a shirt emblazoned with the French words for “I am a bomb” and “Jihad born on September 11th.”
The jihadi mother, Bouchra Bagour, got a suspended sentence of a month in prison and a $2,705 fine. Jihad’s uncle, Zeyad Bagour, got a two-month prison sentence, also suspended, along with a fine of $5,409, for buying him the “I am a bomb” shirt.
But Bouchra and Zeyad Bagour say the whole thing was just a joke. “For me,” said Bouchra in court, “the text is simply my son’s name and his date of birth. It’s a bit different, but I thought it would make people laugh. … My brother gave my son the sweatshirt, I put it on him, and I never thought anything of it.”
Zeyad Bagour added that he “had no intention of being provocative or shocking people. “For me, the words ‘I am a bomb’ mean ‘I am beautiful.’”
The Bagours’ attorney, Gaële Guenoum, expressed shock at the court’s ruling, calling it “severe, surprising and amazing.”
Prosecutors, however, weren’t buying it. “At some point,” one observed, “there must be limits. They are not stupid. They understand the significance of what they are doing.” They knew that in this context, the Bagours weren’t just making a cute joke; they were glorifying evil.
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Nonetheless, the jihad-loving duo had their defenders. Josette Pessemesse of the Front de Gauche party called on the court trying the Bagours to protect the “right to humor.”
The court could be forgiven, however, for not finding the shirt, and the boy’s name, all that funny. After all, Bouchra Bagour would hardly be the first Muslim mother to glorify death and murder in the name of Islam, and to work to instill that love in her children. A Muslim child preacher in 2012 taunted those he has been taught to hate most: “Oh Zionists, we love death for the sake of Allah, just as much as you love life for the sake of Satan.” His words echoed the Qur’an: “Say (O Muhammad): O ye who are Jews! If ye claim that ye are favoured of Allah apart from (all) mankind, then long for death if ye are truthful” (62:6).
This young man’s mother was probably much like Boucha Bagour, as well as the notorious Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of Boston Marathon jihad murderers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The Tsarnaev brothers were a vivid illustration of the old axiom that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: when it was revealed that Tamerlan had been listed in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), the government’s primary terrorist database, it came out that his mother was listed as well.
Zubeidat Tsarnaeva is evidently a committed jihadist. Russian authorities in 2011 caught her discussing jihad with Tamerlan, advising him to go to “Palestine” to wage his jihad there. Instead, Tamerlan ultimately decided to wage his jihad in Boston, whereupon after his death his mother ranted about his surviving brother:
If they are going to kill him. I don’t care. My oldest son is killed, so I don’t care. I don’t care if my youngest son is going to be killed today. I want the world to hear this. And, I don’t care if I am going to get killed too. And I will say Allahu Akbar!
Then there was the quintessential mother from hell, Mariam Farhat, or Umm Nidal (mother of Nidal), a Palestinian parliamentarian who died in March 2013. Umm Nidal’s sons Muhammad, Nidal and Rawad were all killed waging jihad against Israel; when she heard of Muhammad’s death, Umm Nidal cried out “Allahu Akbar” and “prepared boxes of halva and chocolates, and handed them out to his friends.”
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She explained:
One sacrifices what is precious, not what is of little value. My children are the most precious thing in my life. That is why I sacrificed them for a greater cause — for Allah, who is more precious than them. My son is not more precious than his God, he is not more precious than the places holy to Islam, and he is not more precious than his homeland or his Islam. Not at all.
Umm Nidal even encouraged her other sons to murder Israelis and get killed in the process, thereby attaining a place in Islamic Paradise: “I encouraged all my sons to die a martyr’s death, and I wish this even for myself.”
Umm Nidal was a heroine among Palestinians. When she died, 4,000 people attended her funeral, including the Hamas prime minister. Her grandchildren appeared on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV, where a child presenter said: “She raised her children from an early age on love of martyrdom for the sake of Allah, as well as on love of the homeland and its defense. We should learn from them. We should wage Jihad and persevere, in order to liberate this land. When one of us is martyred, we say that his life is precious, yet it is a cheap price to pay for the liberation and defense of the homeland.”
Speaking more generally of jihads worldwide, Ayman al-Zawahiri’s wife advised Muslim women: “I advise you to raise your children in the cult of jihad and martyrdom and to instil in them a love for religion and death.”
From the looks of the way she named and dressed her son, Bouchra Bagour was busy doing just that and, once the glare of the media is gone, will probably continue to do so, helping to raise a new generation of jihad warriors – while clueless and feckless Western authorities wring their hands over “Islamophobia.”
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