What is a Martyr?

"The God we worship was sacrificed, crucified on the cross, tortured, spit on, and was still forgiving. This is our highest example." ~ Mosab Hassan Yousef, author of Son of Hamas

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Over the past few days, I’ve been following the story of Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi sentenced to death for supporting the protest movement triggered by Mahsa Amini's death in 2022 (which I wrote about in The Insanity of Western Women Defending Oppression.

That got me thinking about what it means to be a martyr.

That led to thoughts of the anti-Israeli protests/riots (we can now without a doubt call them this) and I wondered what those ignorant students would think if they knew about Toomaj Salehi and how they were protesting in favor of regimes that would kill them, too, given half a chance.

Then, yesterday, I came across Amir Pars’s Substack, Amir’s Musings. Pars is an Iranian living in Sweden. In his piece Confessions of a former antisemite, he describes his upbringing:

“In the cultures we grew up in - even when there was very little else in common (Shia v Sunni, Arab vs Persian, Religious vs Atheist, Theocrat vs Monarchist etc) - Jew-hatred is omnipresent. We were born with it, we grew up with it, we were indoctrinated in it. You have Peppa Pig, we have Hate The Jew. It’s in our bone marrow.”

He adds this disturbing photo to illustrate:

That’s when I decided to write this essay.

It’s very difficult for Westerners to grasp what Pars is talking about. We tend to think, surely that’s an exaggeration. It just happens to be his experience, not everyone’s. Of course, it’s not the experience of everyone. But unfortunately, to say children in Islamic states are not indoctrinated to martyr themselves from a young age is to deny a fundamental truth that anyone who has freed themselves from this yoke would tell you, such as Amir Pars or Aayan Hirsi Ali or Mosab Hassan Yousef.

In Islam, one who martyrs themselves is given the honorific shaheed. The word derives from the root shahida (Arabic: شهد), meaning "to witness". Traditionally martyrdom has an exalted place in Islam. It is widely believed among Muslims that the sins of believers who "die in the way of God" will be forgiven by Allah. One of the most contentious promises for martyrs is that they will get 72 virgins in paradise. Women don’t get 72 virgin men, of course.

To be a martyr is taught from birth and it carries on in the school curriculum.

A 2017 study, "Palestinian Elementary School Curriculum 2016–17: Radicalization and Revival of the PLO Program," was conducted by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (in Jerusalem) and can be found here.

National Education and Socialization, Grade 4, Vol. 1, 2016–-17, p. 59. Sacrifice and martyrdom, or suicide attacks, are not taught in the abstract, but are directly related to actual conflagrations. Students are aware that they should follow in the footsteps of those martyrs (shuhada) who died before them.

Messages such as: “Warrior, warrior, warrior”; “the volcano of my revenge”; “the longing of my blood for my land”; “With the wind's storm and the weapon's fire”; “I vow I shall sacrifice my blood, to saturate the land”; “we gave our spirits to the revolution.”

Here is how the Palestinian grade 4 math textbook teaches math:

The number of martyrs of the First Intifada during 1987–93 totaled 2026 martyrs, and the number of martyrs of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Intifada in the year 2000 totaled 5,050 martyrs while the number of the wounded reached 49,760. How many martyrs died in the two Intifadas?

The number of the Palestine martyrs during the aggression on the Gaza Strip in the year 2014 reached 2,139. * Write the number of martyrs in words; then read the number. * Write a number that is one greater than that number. * Write a number that is one smaller than that number. Mathematics, Grade 3, Vol. 1, 2016–17, p. 19

Martyrdom is the highest calling.

Money sent by the United Nations as aid for Palestinians is used by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to pay the families of terrorist “martyrs”, to incentivize families to offer up their children as martyrs.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York, U.S., September 27, 2018. REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs

In a Sept. 26, 2019, speech before the U.N. General Assembly, PA president Mahmoud Abbas declared, "Even if I had only one penny, I would've given it to the families of the martyrs, prisoners and heroes."

The UN audience applauded Abbas's boast of paying people to murder Jews.

In the first five months of 2019 alone, the PA paid terrorists and their families $66 million—an 11.8 percent increase from the previous year.

Attacks by would-be martyrs are carried out relentlessly on Jews.

On April 6th police thwarted a suspected stabbing attack in Jerusalem’s Old City. The terrorist was a 17-year-old boy from the West Bank. Two people were wounded, one seriously. He will be added to the list of “children” that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas says Israel is holding unjustly.

Just yesterday, a Palestinian woman was shot dead in Hebron after she allegedly tried to stab an Israeli soldier. The Palestinian Authority describes the 20-year-old woman as being killed by "occupation gunfire north of Hebron." In contrast the Israel Defense Forces said, “The terrorist was armed with a knife and ran toward the soldiers, who responded with fire and eliminated the terrorist. No injuries were reported." 

She will be added to the list of martyrs, “unjustly murdered” by the IDF.

In the video below, you can see the revolting story of one proud mother who sent her son to be martyred. And to be clear, being a martyr means killing as many Jews as possible while killing yourself.

The journalist describes the massive posters all around the city of martyrs and how they are treated like celebrities. The glorification of martyrs is so pervasive that mothers offer up their children as martyrs, like this mother who proudly gave her 19-year-old son, filmed her good-bye to him, and now wants her other sons to follow his path.

I wonder how much money she got for her martyred son. How much does she hope to get if she succeeds in convincing her other sons to become martyrs? How many sons does she have? It would probably never be enough.

In the West we see a disturbing shift in identifying who are the victims/martyrs and who are the villains.

Today in The Free Press is the story of Sahar Tartak, a Yale student stabbed in the eye by an over six feet tall protestor because she is a Jew.

She described how after the attack “sitting in the hospital, I couldn’t help but think of my mother, Shahnaz, who grew up in Iran. Her neighbors threw rocks at her for being a Jew. She has a scar on her eyelid to this day.” 

Tartak notes how these students of our most prestigious colleges praise Walid Daqqa, a “martyr” who commanded the terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and was imprisoned for the kidnapping, mutilation, and murder of 19-year-old Israeli Moshe Tamam.

Daqqa spent 38 years in prison and died of cancer not long ago. When the Israeli government refused to release him at the end of his life, protests erupted. Somehow, American youth think this is something worth protesting about, a great injustice. Surely, they could find something far more worthy in their own country.

Imagine if the person who stabbed Sahar Tartak was praised by our government and paid money as if he had done something honorable.

Okay, too hard to believe? How about if he is caught and put in jail and protests erupt around the country at the injustice of it. This is what happens in Gaza and the West Bank when terrorists are caught and imprisoned. And now, American students do the same, holding up terrorists like Walid Daqqa as martyrs to be revered.

If you recall the BLM protests/riots, they were conditioning young people to accept this madness now.

I will never forget the 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin, which left him paralyzed. Protests were organized against the police. “Justice for Jacob Blake” they cried.

Kamala Harris set the example by visiting his family to comfort them in their “pain” and telling Blake she was “proud of him”—a violent man with a knife who was about to drive off with his young son in a stolen car. Who knows what might have happened to that boy if the police hadn’t stopped him.

Harris never visited the boy or his mother, the real victims. She never even mentioned them. Blake had just sexually assaulted the mother, as he had done many times before, stolen her car and forced the child to come away with him. Yet Jacob Blake was the victim.

Time after time we saw this happen. The victims were forgotten while those who terrorized the victims were elevated to the status of martyrs.

I grew up in a strict evangelical Christian family, but I was never indoctrinated in church or in school that I should be a martyr. I did learn about martyrs and that being one was a blessing. But they were martyrs precisely because they refused to raise a hand against those who hated them.

In all my years growing up, the churches I attended, the schools, the homes of friends where I had dinner, the movies I watched, the books I read, and then in all my travels to Western countries, in all my years living in England, Switzerland, France, Slovenia—nowhere did I hear that it was desirable, or that I would become a martyr and get a reward in paradise, by killing Muslims, or anyone of any other religion.

The only place I ever heard such things was when my family escaped out of Egypt right before the 6 Day War and when I was living in Egypt just three years ago.

I have been blessed to meet real martyrs, such as Richard Wurmbrand, his wife and son, who I wrote about in other essays.

As a Romanian Jew who became a Christian pastor, he spent 14 years imprisoned, first by the Nazis and then by the communists. I was 9 years old when he first came to visit my family, as many people came to our home to meet with my dad, Dave Hunt. In 1966, Wurmbrand testified before the United States Congress about his years of torture and the entire world listened. Who is listening today?

Jim Elliot was a martyr and a friend of my parents. He died the year I was born so I never knew him. He was a Plymouth Brethren, the same as my family. He was one of five missionaries to Ecuador killed by Huaorani warriors. Life Magazine published an article about him.

“He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” ~ Jim Elliot

I remember my parents talking about his life and death with overwhelming respect and admiration.

Yes, he went to Ecuador to “convert the natives” but not by the sword. Not as the Spanish had done long before. You might not agree with him doing it, you might not understand why he did it, you might even think he was foolish, but surely we all can agree that he had a faith, courage and love far beyond beyond what any of us will probably ever have.

Here are a few Bible verses about martyrdom:

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 5:10

“But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Matthew 5:44

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:35-39

Why don’t we learn about Christian martyrs? Why aren’t martyrs acknowledged and respected? Can anyone who is reading this now name a martyr from the last twenty years? If so, please put them in the comments, I would love to know.

How about the Christians being killed in Nigeria. Every two hours a Nigerian is murdered for their faith.

52,250 Nigerian Christians have been brutally murdered since 2009 at the hands of Islamist militants. 18,000 churches have been set on fire.

So, let’s honor some of those Nigerian Christian martyrs now.

Deborah Samuel

Deborah Samuel, daughter, sister: To a shocked world, 19-year-old Deborah Samuel, also known as Deborah Yakubu, is the most prominent face of Christian persecution in Nigeria. She was stoned and her body set on fire by a mob of her Muslim classmates for a series of posts that began in a chatroom when she was asked how she passed her exams. She replied, “Jesus” and refused to take down the post when Muslims in the chat group demanded it. She lived in Sokoto State, one of 12 areas governed by Sharia (Islamic) law.

Father John Mark Cheitnum, son, brother: On July 15, 2022, he was kidnapped by extremists from the church where he served in the Lere region of Kaduna state and was killed in a field that day. He was 44 years old.

Chukwudiorinya Onuoha, son, brother, husband, father; Deborah Onuoha, daughter, sister, wife, mother: The Onuohas were two of the worshippers who were celebrating Pentecost at St. Francis Catholic Church in Owo, on June 5, when a group of armed men opened fire on the congregation, killing 40 people, including four children.

Rev. Emmanuel Bileya, son, brother, husband, father; Juliana, daughter, sister, wife, mother: While working on the farm their church owned in Taraba state, Emmanuel Bileya and his pregnant wife Juliana were shot and killed on June 2, 2020. They were parents to eight children and were expecting their ninth.

Eunice Olawale, daughter, sister, wife, mother. Every morning Eunice Olawale brought her Bible and megaphone to an area in her home city of Abuja to preach the Word of God. She was well-known as a street evangelist and preacher. At only 42 years old, she was murdered by suspected extremists during the early morning hours of July 9, 2016, as she preached the gospel in the streets.

I suppose I am so passionate about the subject, not only because of the martyrs I met, but because of the stories I heard about martyrs as a child. Some of my ancestors were martyrs. Since my mother was Dutch Mennonite, she could trace her family back to the 17th century.

She often told us stories from The Martyr’s Mirror. First published in 1660, it documents the stories and testimonies of Christian martyrs, especially Anabaptists who were tortured and burned at the stake for refusing to give up their faith. My own ancestor went to visit the King of Spain to plead for mercy for those who were suffering and died in prison there.

I, in turn, have told these stories to my own children. If I am around long enough, I will tell them to my grandchildren, too. My mother put it all in a wonderful book and made copies for each of her four children. My son, Max, especially, loves to read this book and look at the pictures.

If we have such stories, we owe it to our children to pass them on.

And we would be foolish not to listen to people such as Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a Hamas co-founder who spent many years in Israeli prisons. Mosab was indoctrinated since childhood with this mentality of victimhood and martyrdom.

As Mosab got older, he began to question the way he was raised.

“Palestinians no longer blamed Yasser Arafat or Hamas for their troubles. Now they blamed the Israelis for killing their children. But I still couldn't escape a fundamental question: Why were those children out there in the first place? Where were the parents? Why didn't their mothers and fathers keep them inside? Those children should have been sitting at their desks in school, not running in the streets throwing stones at armed soldiers.”

Unfortunately, as we can see, schools are hotbeds of indoctrination.

You might resist what Mosab has to say, but at least admit he has a clearer idea than you do when he talks about the Islamic fundamentalism that he was taught as a child:

“Hamas does not care about the lives of Palestinians. [They don't] care about the lives of Israelis or Americans. They don't care about their own lives. They consider dying for the sake of their ideology a way of worship…. that is, its radical religious outlook in which Islam is the solution to the world's problems.”

In his book, Son of Hamas, Mosab describes what happened when he first read the teachings of Jesus from Matthew 5:43-45:

“Then I read this: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven” That’s it! I was thunderstruck. Never before had I heard anything like this. But I knew that this was the message I had been searching for all my life. For years I had struggled to know who my enemy was, and I had looked for my enemies outside of Islam and Palestine, but I suddenly realized that the Israelis were not my enemies. Neither was Hamas, nor my Uncle Ibrahim, nor the kid who beat me… nor the ape like guards... I saw that enemies were not defined by nationality, religion, or color. I understood that we all share the same common enemies. Greed, pride, and all of the bad ideas and the darkness of the devil that live inside us. That meant I could love anyone.”

Yousef became a Christian, not because of religion but because of Jesus. It was Jesus who liberated him from “feelings of fear, shame and guilt.”

Our children need to hear what Mosab Hassan Yousef has to say—at least as a balance to everything else they are hearing. They need to hear what Amir Par has to say. They need to hear the stories of the martyrs who are being killed in Nigeria today, like Rev. Emmanuel Bileya and Eunice Olawale.

But teaching begins at home. With us as parents. Imagine how much different our colleges would look if our children were taught such stories of heroism and faith from a young age.