Cult of Death

nytimes.com ^ | September 7, 2004 | DAVID BROOKS

[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

[TheCrusader]

"WHY IN THE HELL IS IT TAKING SO LONG TO SHUT DOWN THIS MUSLIM DEATH CULT?"

Worldwide Islamic terrorism is bieng allowed to happen because very few people understand the concept of EVIL anymore, and they don't understand that you cannot negotiate with evil or peacefully co-exist with it.

We live in times when Christianity is waning and faith is luke warm at best. This creates a kind of spiritual blindness that forces us to rely on the science of psychology and the theology of appeasement and conciliatin, (aka 'tolerance').

We think that if we could only 'understand' our enemies' mentality or find a way to negotiate with them, then they would stop hating us and the killings would cease. Of course this assinine thinking will never work. Both France and Russia tried the way of appeasement by condemning the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, and now France has had their journalists kidnapped, and Russia has suffered a massive terror attack.

I honestly don't think this Islamic evil can be defeated without Divine help. It's the type of 'combat' that renders much of our technological advances useless. The cowardly, craven Islamoterrorists neutralize our military might by simply avoiding it. They easily infiltrate us and blow up our buildings, our women and children, and our civilians. Evil lives by no rules and has no morals. It cannot be reasoned with. The Islamic terrorists take advantage of our open society, but they also take great advantage of our 'tolerance' and PC mentality.

Maybe if our public schools taught our kids how to identify a possible terrorist instead of how to embrace everyone and everything in our 'multi-cultural', diverse society it would be a good start to eradicating these murderous scum. But don't hold your breath waiting.

[risk]

He's on the Lehrer News Hour shilling for the RINO component of the Republican party weeknightly, which is how I know he's not ideal as a Security Advisor. I don't think he's of the Reagan sort of moderate, either.

[boycott]

ping

[Travis McGee]

Squishy RINOs are the only repupbs allowed on the News Hour.

[backhoe]

-Islam, a Religion of Peace®? Some links...--

[Destro]

Why McCain's Scary:

http://www.issues2000.org/Senate/John_McCain_Foreign_Policy.htm

Russia: Sanctions until Putin exits Chechnya

McCain says acting Russian President Vladimir Putin should be urged to end the conflict with Chechen militants under threat of sanctions, as issue he would talk about “every day” as president. “I’d state unequivocally that there would be no more US Export-Import Bank loans, that the US would not support any furhter IMF funding until this thing is brought to some kind of reasonable conclusion,” he said.

Source: Associated Press, in The Enterprise (Brockton MA), p. A9 Jan 4, 2000

[Humidston]

>>One - only ONE - Trident submarine could end Islam as an viable movement in the world in under 45 minutes if it comes down to it.<<

I hope you're right. Meanwhile, check out this tidbit... Not sure a Trident could hit this target:

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040907-122639-4027r.htm

[infowarrior]

Another reason for the failure of Islam is their abysmal treatment and disenfranchisement of women...

The "multicultural" crowd wish us to believe that no one religion is right. Ok, but any religion, which has at its core, the enslavement of half the human race (the female half), isn't hitting too high on the "rightness" scale...

the infowarrior

[NYer]

All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this.

From Zenit News Agency

Date: 2004-09-06

Beslan's Orthodox Bishop Urges Unity as Response to Terrorism

Opens "Religions and Cultures" Meeting in Milan

MILAN, Italy, SEPT. 6, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Humanity cannot be divided in the face of terrorism, says the Orthodox bishop whose jurisdiction includes the Russian city where hundreds died in the terrorist school seizure.

Eparch Feofan Ashurkov of Stravropol and Vladikavkaz attended the opening on Sunday of the meeting "Religions and Cultures," organized by the Community of Sant'Egidio. The event has gathered more than 350 religious representatives and cultural leaders.

"Here there is a teaching for the whole of humanity," said the eparch, who is under the Moscow Patriarchate.

"Humanity has no other option than to unite, so that terror will not take place, and to eliminate all the situations that create it," he said. "This is above any other difference."

"When receiving news of the kidnapping, I arrived in Beslan in 30 minutes and offered myself as a mediator, but dialogue was rejected," Eparch Ashurkov said.

"I approached the terrorists several times, but on their side there was no request, no dialogue; they had condemned all to death," the Orthodox bishop lamented.

"Can one call someone who commits such acts a liberator? To struggle for freedom through the death of children?" he asked.

"Those who tried to escape were shot in the back," the bishop recalled. "I myself closed the eyes of several children who were killed that way. How can someone who acts like that call himself a liberator?"

Eparch Ashurkov expressed his gratitude to the Holy See "for the important moral support it gave us during these days," before requesting a minute of silence for the victims of Beslan.

The theme of this year's Religions and Cultures meeting is "The Courage of a New Humanism," in keeping with the "spirit of Assisi," fruit of the historical meeting for peace promoted by John Paul II in 1986.

Catholic Ping - let me know if you want on/off this list

[MarMema]

"I myself closed the eyes of several children who were killed that way.

Thank you, God.

And thanks for posting this, Nyer.

[MarMema]

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.

It is what led me to begin studying chechens 7 years ago, a search for something human there. Still looking....

[Norski]

I see. Population pressure, the root cause of war.

So, what's the procedure for stopping this ongoing worldwide hideous debacle?

(Whatever it is, it's non-PC, I am sure. :-)

[Robert Drobot]

What is really sad AND REVOLTING is the traitor socialists in the INS and State Department are working hand in glove with other traitors to bring heathen Chechen bastards in OUR country!!!

Chechen Separatist Granted Asylum in USA

TAKE NOTE: The facilitator of murder is called a 'separatist'. The proper label should be Christian hating barbarian!!!

[tjwmason]

I'm guessing you mean Pim Fortuyn. The link is to an interview he gave before being assissinated http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/05/05/wsimp05.xml; when even [the leftist B.B.C. reporter] John Simpson is forced to admit that he is not a racist, you know that you're facing somebody who knows what he is talking about.

Mr. Fortuyn's position was the Islam threatened the ultra-liberal culture of the Netherlands, and should be opposed for that reason. The painting of him as an extreme right-winger reflects more on the political culture of Europe, than on much else.

[driftless]

Too many libs today have the post-modernists attitude of not being able to say that there is good and evil. They only say that there are some peoples version of good and evil and then there are others. Who can say who has the truth and who doesn't?

Well can we say that shooting children in the back or bayoneting them is evil? What is so difficult to comprehend? What all the weak libs have to know is that those same terrorists who slaughtered the Russian children would just as eagerly and cheerfully slaughter them and their children. At some point libs have to recognize that (1) there is a problem with Islam and (2) terrorists must be killed... not argued with or "understood".

[fly_so_free]

Perfect article-goes straight to the point. Every single sentence is spot on.

[fly_so_free]

What he calls "Death Cult" has historically been known by the term- "Evil".

[BayouCoyote]

Reality BUMP!

[q_an_a]

What Kerry and the RAT family of Carville, Chris Mathews and all the Network talking heads forget is that without afganistan the terrorists are trying to take over another country. They will use Yemen, Russia, Sudan, S. Africa any place they can to set up death machines to KILL Christians and Jews because they Love Death more than they Love Life!!

[Pagey]

"...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..."

I heard Laura Ingraham read this on her radio show this morning. Everybody should forward this to 5 people you know, I already have.