Posted on 09/06/2004 8:50:55 PM PDT by Destro
Cult of Death
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: September 7, 2004
We've been forced to witness the massacre of innocents. In New York, Madrid, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Baghdad and Bali, we have seen thousands of people destroyed while going about the daily activities of life.
We've been forced to endure the massacre of children. Whether it's teenagers outside an Israeli disco or students in Beslan, Russia, we've seen kids singled out as special targets.
We should by now have become used to the death cult that is thriving at the fringes of the Muslim world. This is the cult of people who are proud to declare, "You love life, but we love death." This is the cult that sent waves of defenseless children to be mowed down on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war, that trains kindergartners to become bombs, that fetishizes death, that sends people off joyfully to commit mass murder.
This cult attaches itself to a political cause but parasitically strangles it. The death cult has strangled the dream of a Palestinian state. The suicide bombers have not brought peace to Palestine; they've brought reprisals. The car bombers are not pushing the U.S. out of Iraq; they're forcing us to stay longer. The death cult is now strangling the Chechen cause, and will bring not independence but blood.
But that's the idea. Because the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It's about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying.
It's about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It's about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism - freedom even from human nature, which says, Love children, and Love life. It's about the joy of sadism and suicide.
We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don't want to stare into this abyss. We don't want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.
Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible targets for their rage.
The Boston Globe editorial, which was typical of the American journalistic response, made two quick references to the barbarity of the terrorists, but then quickly veered off with long passages condemning Putin and various Russian policy errors.
The Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened."
It wasn't a tragedy. It was a carefully planned mass murder operation. And it wasn't Russian authorities who stuffed basketball nets with explosives and shot children in the back as they tried to run away.
Whatever horrors the Russians have perpetrated upon the Chechens, whatever their ineptitude in responding to the attack, the essential nature of this act was in the act itself. It was the fact that a team of human beings could go into a school, live with hundreds of children for a few days, look them in the eyes and hear their cries, and then blow them up.
Dissertations will be written about the euphemisms the media used to describe these murderers. They were called "separatists" and "hostage-takers." Three years after Sept. 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil. They still try to rationalize terror. What drives the terrorists to do this? What are they trying to achieve?
They're still victims of the delusion that Paul Berman diagnosed after Sept. 11: "It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable."
This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.
E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com
/pinching myself
Precisely. I'm a shrink. Within psychiatry I seem to have gravitated over the years to dealing with the really sick patients, and it is among my areas of expertise to know when to quit the "negotiating" and tie someone down and give them meds. You have to size up pretty quickly who can and who cannot be reasoned with, and act accordingly, or else people get hurt. People and countries who think all life's problems can be solved by negotiation or avoidance are getting some pretty hard lessons.
As on the money as it gets.
Its the Islam
The Atomic Ayatollah
Show me ONE MSM article that calls these islamic murderers what they were....
There are none.
The presstitutes are crossing a very very dangerous [literally] line.
death cult that is thriving at the fringes of the Muslim world
It isn't on the fridge of the Muslim world. It is harbored, supported and spread by most of the governments in the Islamic world (and also by certain Muslim institutions in other places like in Europe and in the US). It is mainstream. This is not to say all Muslims in the Islamic world subscribe to that, though. But to say it is just a fringe is a major mistake.
Brooks is just a conservative shill.
Everybody knows it was Bush's fault.
I don't buy that line of crap. At all!
It is way deeper than lunatic fringe level.
Why is it that the rest of the civilized world is outraged when one of these acts of cowardice occur. The free countries of this world unanimously condemn these acts...
And where is the outcry from the Muslim / Islamic world?
I know what I saw on the morning of 9/11. People dancing in the streets in joy. And they were not American.
Nice bumper sticker / sign.......
ISLAM - the Cult of Death.
LVM
In that abyss, if we are honest, we see the darkest corners of each of our own souls as well. That is why a Savior is not optional.
Yup - and viewing non-Muslims as those who need to be eliminated.
Let me say this again. The actions are mainstream. Not on the fringe. Not exceptional.
Absolutely right on!
Wake up world Satan is alive and kicking and he must be put in his place.
Only God can do that. It's a fork in the road -- fear the Lord or else be terrified to paralysis by the spiritual forces of wickedness in the celestial realms.
No, it is NOT at the fringes.
Exactly. Except it's not a small quibble at all, imo. It's huge. Libs and their damned tolerance would have us tolerate our own murders. If Brooks had told the truth on this point, I doubt the NYT would keep him around.
David Brooks does not use the word once
Qur’an 9:5 “Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.”
Bukhari:V4B52N50“The Prophet said, ‘A single endeavor of fighting in Allah’s Cause is better than the world and whatever is in it.’”
Qur’an 9:112 “The Believers fight in Allah’s Cause, they slay and are slain, kill and are killed.”
Qur’an 9:29 “Fight those who do not believe until they all surrender, paying the protective tax in submission.”
Qur’an 8:39 “Fight them until all opposition ends and all submit to Allah.”
Qur’an 8:39“So fight them until there is no more Fitnah (disbelief [non-Muslims]) and all submit to the religion of Allah alone (in the whole world).”
DO NOT BELIEVE THAT THE MUSLUM RELIGION IS PEACEFUL, THAT IS HYPE. MUSLUMS WANT TO KILL US, PERIOD!
Sorry, I lost the quotation italics.
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