Films directed by
Hany Abu-Assad

Paradise Now

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The suicide bomber has to be the most impenetrable enigma to the western mind. I don’t think we can even comprehend the idea of a young person, presumably healthy in body and mind, purposely throwing away his or her life just to kill a few people who are often not even a party to the conflict in which the bomber is engaged. We can wrap our brains around the concept of a soldier sacrificing himself as he runs up Omaha Beach into the teeth of a German machine gun nest, but there are two key differences. One, his death is not the goal but just a consequence and, two, the people getting killed on the other side are soldiers as well.

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