‘You’d Want to Blow Them Up!?’ Ex-Fox Correspondent Tells Bari Weiss Shocking Palestinian Suicide Bomber Story

NewsNation anchor Leland Vittert relayed a shocking story about a Palestinian suicide bomber he interviewed as a Fox News foreign correspondent to Bari Weiss on the latest episode of her podcast, Honestly.

“We can talk about how sort of my my view of the world was shaped in the Middle East because when I went over there, I kind of had much of the, ‘Hey, you know, there’s a-, it’s a two sides deal, and we need a two-state solution,’ and all of the sort of usual-”

“Conventional wisdom,” offered Weiss.

“Conventional wisdom. I was going to call it brainwashing, but that’s a different-, conventional wisdom that exists and that changed, but it was time to come home,” continued Vittert.

“Well, take a beat, take one beat on that. How did it change?” inquired Weiss.

That’s when Vittert launched into the story:

VITTERT: Real simple. 2012, I’m a foreign correspondent for Fox and you know, normally when you’re when you’re based in Jerusalem, you’re covering suicide bombings. You’re covering protests in the West Bank, or riots in the West Bank, on, and on, and on. Because of the Arab Spring, I really hadn’t spent that much time in Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was not a thing in those years. There’d been a couple of Gaza skirmishes, but there was the Gilad Shalit deal where there was a Israeli soldier who had been held hostage and traded from Gaza to Israel for a thousand Gaza prisoners.

WEISS: Including Sinwar.

VITTERT: Including Sinwar, and including a woman named Wafaa, and Wafaa had been a woman in the West Bank-, a woman in Gaza. She had pulled a pot of boiling water over herself when she was like five or six years old The Israelis treat most of the people out of Gaza who have really horrific burns, catastrophic medical injuries. She goes back to Gaza after being treated for four or five years in Israel, but has a past to get in and out of Israel, which very few people in Gaza did at the time. So she gets recruited to be a suicide bomber. This is in the Second Intifada, so mid-2000s. And there’s the video of her coming to the checkpoint to get into Israel wearing her suicide vest And she’d been given three target options by the Al-Asqa Martyrs Brigade: a bus, a cafe, or the hospital that had treated her and saved her life. She chose the hospital that had treated her and saved her life. She gets to the checkpoint they discover that she has a bomb or they  think she does, she tries to detonate it, it doesn’t go off. She gets thrown in jail. Again, the Israelis treat her, they help her with her burns, they educate her, they give her a college degree.

And now in the Gilad Shalit deal, she goes back to Gaza. So I go to Gaza to interview her thinking this is going to be a redemption story — it was before Christmas, right? That she is gonna say, “I am going to be the one to try and forge peace and I believe in peace, and I’ve seen that the Israelis are not evil that I don’t want to kill them anymore.” Fine. So I get into Gaza and I bring with me an iPad that has the video of her trying to blow herself up. So we’re sitting across from each other like this. She’s wearing a hijab in a very junkie Gazan apartment, it is an awful place in every sense of the word. And I show her the video and I said, “What are you thinking watching this?” She goes, “Oh, oh, oh.” Has all this reaction she goes, “Oh.” she goes, “I’m thinking I almost tasted paradise.” Okay. “Would you do it again?” “Absolutely in a minute. This is my calling in life.” I said, “Wait a second, these people treated you and all of your burns, they saved your life, you tried to blow them up, they still treated you, they educated you, and now you have a chance at life back here in Gaza and you’d want to blow him up?” And she goes, “Absolutely, they are the infidels. They are evil. They’re the enemy.” I can’t remember what the exact translation was and that’s when my mind was made up about sort of the moral clarity of the Israeli-Palestinian debate. are the Israelis perfect? No, but that’s what they’re up against.

Watch above via The Free Press on YouTube.