We heard the intriguing truth not long ago, in one of the Islamic demonstrations in favor of the Hamas terrorist organization: “You believe that death is the end, we believe that death is the beginning!” – cried the brainwashed protester.

How can you convince someone, given that they believe that death is a beginning – not to risk their own life and the lives of their friends for some purpose? From a purely mathematical point of view this sounds like a problem without a solution… unless you re-examine the data: Is it really “given” that they believe that death is a beginning?

Let’s see who (statistically) is more likely to believe that death is a beginning: Children who have read fairy tales, religious believers of all kinds, people in remote parts of the world who have never been exposed to education, and certain mental patients. And now let’s see who (statistically) believes this less: Scientists, educated people, atheists, and those with analytical thinking.

Hence there is an immediate logical conclusion: One of the most promising fights against terror is to transfer as many people as possible from the first group to the second group. How do you do that? The answer is self-evident, according to the nature of the above groups: Education, dissemination of relevant information, convincing people of its correctness, you know.

So perhaps along with the thousands of flyers dropped from airplanes on the residents of Gaza, it would be useful to also include short summaries in simple Arabic, designed in a way appealing to readers – about how the brain works, scientific studies on cognition and feelings, as well as information on how and when all those legends about “life after death” developed. Somehow it seems that Hamas will be afraid of these flyers – one can only hope that the Israelis are not.