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Posted on 09/17/2001 4:31:23 AM PDT by IronJack

The most absurd aspect of the Trade Center bombings is that the butchery was committed in the name of religion, as if there's a god somewhere who delights in wholesale murder carried out in his name. Of course, the murderers no longer know or care what or whom they're killing, but as always in a case of indulgent criminality, some veneer of respectability must accompany it or it becomes just another act of genocide.

The terrorists think that couching their savagery in quasi-religious or nationalistic terms elevates it above mere murder and grants it the dispensation of nobility. But Islamic scholars confirm that nothing in the Koran gives license to wholesale slaughter of innocents, and agree that the jihad against America has its roots in soil far more secular than celestial. In rare interviews, Bin Laden has admitted that his goal is the extermination of the United States, and relishes the day when his holy warriors can hide behind trees and shoot down infidels.

Apparently we have regressed to an age when religious war once again threatens civilization, as it has for centuries in the Middle East. Cultures as old as those in the cradle of mankind should have developed economically and technologically beyond the primitive second-world stage that characterizes most of the eastern Mediterranean. Only unceasing war has prevented those peoples from advancing into a thoroughly modern world, whose agricultural practices feed their people, whose factories produce goods that ease their citizens' daily burdens, and whose security transports life from mere survival to a waking ration of joy.

In those precincts, any sign of progress is regarded as evidence that the enemy has virtues your side lacks. Rather than working to develop those assets of your own, the solution has traditionally been to destroy the assets of the enemy. It's the ultimate technique for social leveling: keep everyone living in stone huts and eating gruel and nobody can claim any moral superiority over anyone else. It's life resigned to the lowest common denominator.

Now, those brutes seek to export their own brand of cultural devolution to the rest of the world. It is no coincidence that they struck at the World Trade Center, a marvel of engineering and a fitting tribute to the advanced culture that produced it. In regions where centuries of brutality and privation have reduced even the mountains to rubble, a gleaming symbol of western success must have stood as a constant reminder of their own cultural inadequacy. Call it penis envy on a socio-cultural scale.

Or call it class envy. The United States has not achieved all its successes without some measure of shadowy behavior; we are not above reproach in our dealings with the Indians and with many of the immigrant classes over the years. The pursuit of power can distort the noble leanings of otherwise good men and women. Maybe America is too material, too loutish, too overbearing in its paper chase. But, inflamed rhetoric notwithstanding, we are not hegemonic, we are not imperialistic, we are not Gucci-shod exploiters of the downtrodden. Nor are we warmongers who use our military as economic porters to plunder conquered nations. Far from rapine, our contribution to post-war Europe was the Marshall Plan. And Japan was effectively rebuilt from smoking ruin into a first-class world player using American know-how. Any number of third-world flytraps owe their very existence to us, since we've underwritten loans to them for decades, and have seen only a pittance ever repaid.

Even in the battered ruins of the Middle East, the United States has tried to negotiate a peace accord for the past 50 years. Every hope has vanished in the corrosive fog of bigotry, irrational hatred, and what appear to be irreconcilable cultural differences. For siding with Israel, for asserting that nation's right to exist, our citizens are now to be targets of skulking assassins and knife-wielding kamikazes. For professing a belief in God instead of Allah, we have been branded as a Great Satan, singled out for destruction as the head of an anti-Islamic snake whose demise guarantees its killer a fast track to Heaven.

But this isn't about religion anyway. It would be nice to grant Osama his dispensation, for following his tortured conscience and simply obeying the will of Allah. But that's just grist for the PR mills. The fact is, this strike - and all the others against Western targets - is the result of simple jealousy. The Islam-dominated cultures of the Middle East, left to their own devices, have not progressed in 3,000 years to the degree Western civilization has in a tenth that time. Culturally, Islam is losing the war. Its adherents must see that economic development favors non-Islamic countries, while repression, brutality, and misery are the constant shadows cast by the crescent moon. Fundamentalist leaders know that the appeal of materialism is strong, and that they cannot combat that lure through morality alone. Sometimes goodness needs to be coaxed from people at the point of the sword.

So, as power slips from their grasp, they desperately seek a focus for their failures, a "Great Satan" on whom they can blame all their own shortcomings. What better target for that hatred than the Jews and their lucrative allies, the United States? Now, religious differences take on economic overtones, and since there is no separation of mosque and state, political implications as well. It has been stated repeatedly over the last week that the Afghan people despise the Taliban. Yet that oppressive faction rules the country with brutal abandon. At least the Ayatollah had the support of the people. Not for long, mind you, when his extremism became an embarrassment. But in the beginning, anything was better than the Shah.

Not so in Afghanistan. The mujahedeen who were supposed to deliver the country from war have carried the war into the countryside, and into the minds of the exhausted citizenry. The patina of "deliverance' and moral rectitude is wearing thin. Even the Taliban as much as admits that they don't rule Bin Laden; he rules them. So Afghanistan has become a slave state to the whim of a spoiled rich kid from Saudi Arabia, and his personal prejudices are about to earn that unfortunate nation a one-way ride to oblivion. All the lofty rhetoric of the Islamic fanatics hasn't fed the people, taught them to read, or put shoes on their feet. Yet American money made Osama Bin Laden a rich man. The hollow drumbeat of "jihad" is just an annoying undertone to a petty chorus of hypocrisy.

Allah must be very proud.

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