PALESTINIAN BABY KILLERS: This will probably be blogged everywhere today, but the "New Republic" has an excellent column on that infamous picture of the suicide-bomber baby that surfaced a couple of weeks ago.

After first denying relation to the infant shahid, Redwan Abu Turki acknowledged both his grandchild and the authenticity of the photograph, even as he claimed the get-up was nothing but a joke. "The picture was taken just for the fun of it," he shrugged. After all, in the streets of Gaza and Jenin, suicide bombers are heroes. Wondered the baby's uncle, "What's all the fuss about?" Now, cultural humor is an elusive and arbitrary phenomenon. In the West, Stalinist atrocity is recalled far more blithely than Nazi horror ... Jewish culture--and Israeli culture in particular--has some spectacular black humor ... But in the Jewish case, the engine of laughter is the bleakest moment of victimhood, survival from which engenders humor as a coping mechanism. The Abu Turki family, by contrast, is having a chuckle over murdering Jews in bus shelters, supermarkets, nightclubs, and pizzerias. They laugh to celebrate murder--and the consequent death of their own child--not to overcome it.

And this:

It doesn't surprise me," Palestinian Labor Minister Ghassan Khatib enigmatically remarked about the picture. "I know exactly the mentality of the Palestinian people, and I know exactly the way they think." Khatib reveals the true horror of the photograph: its normative place in the Palestinian mind, at least as Khatib understands it. A baby set to detonate in a Jerusalem sandbox in order to establish a fundamentalist nightmare between the river and the sea is a punch line in Ramallah, to the eternal sorrow of Hanan Ashrawi and Sari Nusseibeh. Khatib's blasé testimony suggests, in a nauseatingly profound way, the depths of Palestinian acclimation to suicide bombing.