The spirit of feminism has apparently taken root in the Arab world, as exemplified by the following passage from Samiya Sa'as Al-Din in the Egyptian government daily Al-Akhbar (translation supplied by the Middle East Research Institute) in response to a January 27 suicide bombing—the first perpetrated by a woman, Wafa Idris:

Palestinian women have torn the gender classification out of their birth certificates, declaring that sacrifice for the Palestinian homeland would not be for men alone; on the contrary, all Palestinian women will write the history of the liberation with their blood, and will become time bombs in the face of the Israeli enemy.

Adel Sadeq, head of the psychiatry department at Ein Shams University in Cairo, likewise praised the woman's murderous and suicidal impulses:

If it was the Holy Spirit that placed a child in Mary's womb, perhaps that same holy spirit placed the bomb in the heart of Wafa, and enveloped her pure body with dynamite.

And Reuters reported from Beirut that in an interview with al-Jazeera, Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, "one of Lebanon's most prominent Shiite Muslim cleric[s] has given his blessing to female suicide bombers... calling them authors of a 'new, glorious history for Arab and Muslim women.' "

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