Muslim Couples and Their Children Blow Themselves Up in Indonesia, Killing Many

You know that the morals of deeply religious people totally set them apart from ethically compromised heathens like you and me, right?

Well, about that:

A wave of deadly bombings on Sunday and Monday and evidence of more planned have shaken Indonesia just ahead of the holy month of Ramadan, with entire families — including children — carrying out suicide attacks against Christian worshipers and the police. …

[M]embers of a single family carried out three attacks against separate churches in the city around Mass time, killing seven people.

According to CNN, here’s how that went down:

The father, identified by police as Dita Oepriarto, was said to have driven his wife Puji Kuswati and their two daughters, aged 9 and 12 [pictured above in an old family photo], to the Indonesian Christian Church. The trio went inside and detonated a bomb.

Oepriarto then drove the van to the Pentecostal Central Church, where, from inside the vehicle, he detonated another bomb, police said.

Around the same time the couple’s two teenage sons, aged 16 and 18, drove motorcycles to the Santa Maria Catholic Church, where they also detonated bombs.

But that’s not all. Two other Muslim families went on bombing missions, too. Apparently, in these cases, the family that prays together slays together.

On Sunday night, three members of another family, including a child, were killed when a bomb exploded at their apartment outside Surabaya when the police moved in to arrest them.

And on Monday morning, a family of five riding on two motorbikes detonated a bomb at the entrance of the Surabaya Police Headquarters — killing all but one of them and injuring four police officers.

We’ve seen children used as suicide bombers on religious missions before, but I can’t recall a situation where an entire family, minors included, decided to blow other people to smithereens for the greater glory of Allah. Times three.

Ah, religious fundamentalism — always astonishing you with new lows.

All told, 12 civilians and 13 terrorist suspects were dead from two days of violence, with at least 46 people injured, including police officers.

The Times notes that

Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, practices one of the most moderate forms of Islam in the world, but still has a homegrown terrorism problem. The country has experienced numerous attacks in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, including deadly terrorist bombings on the resort island of Bali in 2002 and 2005, and bombings of international hotels in Jakarta in 2003 and 2009.

If these are the kinds of acts that occur in a climate dominated by “moderate forms of Islam,” I’d hate to ponder (again) what those who grow up around extremist Islam are capable of.

ISIS, truthfully or not, has claimed responsibility for the Indonesian attacks, calling them “martyrdom operations.”

Original.