If you want to get a sense of one of the deep pathologies that afflicts Palestinian culture, look at one detail in particular of today’s terror attack in Jerusalem, in which an Arab resident of East Jerusalem drove his car into a crowd of Israelis:

The 19-year-old had wanted to marry his cousin, and when she refused his offer, he decided to carry out a terror attack, Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said.

The terrorist was a rejected teenager. Well, so what? Isn’t that a universal phenomenon? In Arab culture, especially Palestinian, this kind of rejection — especially within the family, as this particular person experienced with his cousin — is a point of deep shame, and Arab culture is perhaps the greatest honor/shame culture on earth. When you are publicly shamed, you have to regain your honor. And Palestinians have been teaching their children for generations that one of the most honorable things in the world to do is murder Jews. Such killers, no matter how humiliating their existence before martyrdom, are instantly transformed into celebrities and hailed as the most honorable members of society. In a culture such as this, it should not be surprising that personal humiliation is so frequently translated into Jew-killing.