Montezuma… took their children to sacrifice to his idols.

­­— Hernán Cortés, The Second Letter to Charles V.

Helpless as we were in our infancy against the terrifying and unfathomable forces of nature, we did the best we could to mitigate the precariousness of our condition. We made sacrifices to the gods that control such forces in desperate hope of propitiating them, and petitioning them to bestow their favours upon us. We imagined that the more highly we value the sacrificial offering, the more pleasing such offering would be to the recipient deity and the more likely the sought-after blessing would be forthcoming. Children won out over other possible sacrificial objects, as the most highly-prized by the gods.

The more we learned about ourselves and the universe, and the more our humanity grew, the more we came to substitute other sacrificial objects for our children, such as plundered slaves, prisoners of war, and the condemned. Human sacrifice eventually made way for animal sacrifice and finally, inanimate offerings. In his article Sacrificium, Leonhard Schmitz alludes to this phenomenon in reference to Greece:

In the historical times of Greece we find various customs… which can only be accounted for by supposing that they were introduced as substitutes for human sacrifices. In other cases where civilisation had shown less of its softening influences, human sacrifices remained customary throughout the historical periods of Greece, and down to the time of the emperors.

So thorough-going has been this “softening influence of civilisation,” that child sacrifice has, at first glance, all but vanished before civilisation. From time to time, news emerges of child sacrifice in contemporary animist societies, especially at their interface with modernity. These are excluded from this essay for their marginality. Marginal animist societies, though, are not the only ones to have remained untouched by the “softening influence of civilisation.”

When a religion holds itself to be perfect, final, and foreclosing of all possibility of change, it leaves itself only one space into which it might grow if it is not to run foul of itself: broadening its prohibitions and intensifying its punishments, which have the unsurprising consequence of rendering its believers more remote from their own humanity and increasingly driving them to deepening and permanent depravity.

Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the case of child sacrifice in Islam, a religion of late antiquity (the common assertion that Muhammad put an end to the pagan practise of burying infant girls alive is not examined here as it is not relevant). While, as may be inferred from Schmitz, primitive and ancient religions evolve away from child sacrifice towards other sacrificial objects, only in Islam does sacrifice of fighting men evolve backwards into the sacrifice of children, the raising of children for sacrifice and, finally, the deliberate conceiving of children so they may be sacrificed to Allah.

It is not only the young female jihadis who flocked to ISIS from Western countries, as one Umm Muthanna put it, “to have lots of sons & send them off all fi sabil Allah [“in the cause of Allah”] …under the Islamic State,” — intentionally giving life specifically so it can be taken away, it is also one of the defining leitmotivs of “Palestinian” society.

Where “martyrdom” is hardwired into a religion, it will with time evolve into a virtue for general emulation and find its reflection in the ideology as “sacrifice” — an occasional necessity thus elevated to a permanent virtue. “Sacrifice” becomes the benchmark for all suffering, all deprivation; self-negation the only acceptable affirmation. Sacrifice, in the minds of Palestinians, becomes synonymous with their very existence.

When the Fatah cabal (Mahmoud Abbas, Hanan Ashrawi, and others), recently rejected with contempt a $50billion gift for Palestinian economic development, they demonstrated that they understand the role of sacrifice in Palestinian ideology better than those who so generously offered the money. They also understand that nothing embodies this sacrifice mentality more perfectly than child sacrifice.

The Palestinian Authority holds up Latifa “Um Nasser” Abu Hmeid as exemplar for Palestinian mothers and awarded her “the Plaque of Resoluteness and Giving.” What was she giving? According to PA eulogy, she had been, “sacrificing heroes and torches of freedom that have lit the skies of Palestine,” in normal parlance, she gave birth to six terrorists out to slay and be slain. The Inca, too, had an honoured place for the mama-kuna, women who raised the children destined for sacrifice, except that these children were not there own. Among the Mexica, “children were sacrificed… The victims were purchased from their parents, who, if they refused, were themselves sacrificed for insubordination.”

No such trouble in the “perfect religion.” To slay and be slain fi sabil Allah, i.e., in jihad, is the highest virtue in Islam, and for one’s own son to be slain while slaying fi sabil Allah, is the greatest honour. Allah promises a Paradise of non-stop sex with specially-created, large-breasted women who remain forever virgin (Qur’an 78:31-33 and elsewhere) to those who slay and are slain in sacrifice to him. The perfect religion extends this depravity with a covenant that the sacrificial victim will be able to intercede for his family before Allah on the Day of Judgement. In the so-called “martyrdom videos,” Muslims about to sacrifice themselves promise their mothers that they will do just that. One assumes they’ll be able to tear themselves away from the large-breasted, ever-virgin women and find time to make themselves decent for such an august duty. The depravity does not end there. It deepens further when the Palestinian Authority tops up Allah’s side of the bargain by paying gratuities to families whose sons have died in jihad against Israel (or been imprisoned there), especially if they’ve murdered Israeli Jews. “The greatest honour [my son] showed me was his martyrdom,” said an unnamed Palestinian mother on Arab News Network TV. Another such mother (there is no shortage), “Umm Nidal”, speaking on Hamas website, put it this way:

By Allah, today is the best day of my life. I feel that our Lord is pleased with me, because I am offering something [my son] for him. I wish to offer more [sons] for Allah’s forgiveness… By Allah, if I had a hundred children like [my son] Muhammad, I would offer them with sincerity and willingly. It is true that there’s nothing more precious than children, but for the sake of Allah, what is precious becomes cheap.

The ISIS jihadi, Umm Muthanna, above, demonstrates that while the act of sacrifice might take place when the child is an adult, the child can be “given to Allah” at any age, before birth and even before conception. Some idea of the real depth of this depravity in the Palestinian ideology of despair emerges from an interview with a young Palestinian mother of a four-month-old baby whose life had been saved by doctors in Israel. As she recounts, “In Gaza I was told there’s no treatment for it and that he’s destined to die.” During the baby’s post-operative recovery in the Israeli hospital, the mother gets into a bit of an exchange with the Jewish man who organised and just succeeded in saving her child’s life.

“Death is natural for us,” she boasts. “We are not afraid of death. From the youngest infant, even younger than Muhammad [the baby whose life he had just saved], to the oldest one; we all sacrifice ourselves for Jerusalem.”

Later in this increasingly surreal exchange, she smilingly taunts the man who just saved her child’s life, “Don’t you believe in death?” He replies, “No, we consider life valuable,” to which she triumphantly laughs, “Life is zero; life is worthless. That’s why we have all the suicide bombers. They are not afraid of death. It is a normal thing.”

She presses on, oblivious to what must at this point be going through the man who just saved her son’s life. By now her smile is broad, almost radiant, her body sways and her hands are animated, she is enjoying this chance to affirm her barbaric superiority over the infidel: “All of us, even our children, are not afraid of dying. It is natural for us.”

The interviewer, still managing to remain composed, eventually speaks: “I asked you before, after Muhammad will get better, would you want him to be a shahid [in this context, a Muslim who dies killing Jews]?” And in all honesty comes her reply, “Of course!”

Later, having recounted this on-camera interview to her husband, she went into taqiyya damage-limitation, claiming that she had changed her mind. The accompanying tragedy is that Israelis, so desperate for peace, took this lying woman’s supposed change-of-heart at face value, and chalked it up as a feel-good story of what is possible if only we’d ‘give peace a chance.’

In Islam, sacrifice itself has become an idol. The worship of this idol is furthest developed amongst “the Palestinians”, who go to extraordinary lengths to propitiate it with the sacrifice of specially-raised children, specially-conceived children and even medically-saved children, and of course, in Islam’s most authentic manifestation, ISIS. The occasion for heaping yet more praise on Palestine’s most “resolute and giving” mum was the birth of a new grandson, conceived from her son’s sperm smuggled out of prison. Who needs Nobel Prizes if all ingenuity can be for Allah alone?

It would be a sound bet that had Cortés previously encountered the inhabitants of twenty-first century Hebron, Nablus, or Khan Yunus, and witnessed the local king showering treasure and honour upon women who eagerly conceive children for sacrifice, he would not have thought sixteenth-century Aztecs and their king all that uncivilised for merely, “[taking] their children to sacrifice to his idols.”