These killers are neither hopeless nor victims

The Times (U.K.) ^ | 06/25/2002 | Michael Gove

[Pokey78]

Sympathy for suicide bombers is a sign of Western moral failure

Jack Straw takes his cue from John Donne. Asked by The Times last week what lesson could be drawn from the killing of 20 Israelis by a Palestinian terrorist, the Foreign Secretary invited observers to feel “a degree of compassion” for suicide bombers. Any man’s death diminishes me, Donne wrote, because I am involved in mankind.

My colleague Matthew Parris takes his cue from another poet. In seeking to argue that there was something “ennobling” in the suicide bombers’ self-sacrifice, he quoted from Horace — Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Both Parris and the Foreign Secretary are seeking to do what a certain type of civilised Englishman has long sought to do in the face of wickedness — bring the protagonists within the pale of civilised understanding. They, and Cherie Blair, urge us to feel the suicide bombers’ pain. Consider yourself without hope, and imagine to what ends you might be driven.

The cumulative effect of these interventions has been to make the “desperation” which “drives” these bombers to blow themselves up the central question for observers of the conflict in the Middle East. How, we are invited to ask, can we remove the “hopelessness” which leads to “self-sacrifice”? Powerful as this line of argument can be, it is also a profound, and dangerous, moral evasion. What these arguments evade is the reality of the bombers’ motivation.

Their acts are not expressions of despair or hopelessness, “cries for help” as the West has come to understand suicide. Nor are they the noble stands of outnumbered warriors, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, or Samson in the Temple. They are the calculated acts of men and women whose ideology celebrates death in a fashion which almost defies Western comprehension. Indeed, these acts are designed to elicit compassion in the West for the killers, a sentiment which the bombers know undermines the West’s capacity to resist barbarism.

The terrorist responsible for the bus bombing which killed 20 Israelis last Wednesday, Mohammed al-Ghoul, was explicit in his motivation. “How beautiful it is to make my bomb shrapnel kill the enemy,” he wrote immediately before he did just that, “how beautiful it is to kill and be killed.” These are not the words of one in despair, but on the verge of exultation.

Al-Ghoul was not a wretched, hopeless, outcast but a student pursuing a master’s degree in Islamic studies. His act was not a cry for help but the culminating affirmation of an ideology which holds sway in the Palestinian Authority and other centres of Islamist fundamentalism across the world. It is an ideology inculcated in children from their earliest years.

At a recent “graduation exercise” in a Gaza kindergarten children burnt an Israeli flag and a young girl had her hands dipped in red paint to celebrate the lynching of two Israeli soldiers. Another child dressed as the Hamas leader, Hassan Nasrallah, recited lines praising Hezbollah for its fight against the Israelis, a struggle that would win rewards “from above”. Other children carried toy rifles.

What, I wonder, is “ennobling” about such a ceremony? There is a moral gulf of almost unbridgeable proportions between the stand which we in the West can admire, of taking one’s life in one’s hands against formidable odds, the stand of the rearguard action, of Horatio on the bridge or the Coldstreamers at Dunkirk, and the deliberate grooming of kindergarten children for their place in a death cult.

This culture of death has not taken root in an arid desert of despair but a land irrigated by outside money. EU cash has helped to fund an education system which twists minds with anti-Jewish propaganda. The Saudis and Iraqis have created a perverted “welfare” system which rewards the families of suicide bombers with significant wealth. The Palestinian Authority has used its autonomy, and the period of negotiation which followed the Oslo agreement, to build an infrastructure. It is not, however, one of a state pledged to peace, but a society configured to kill. Both its Jewish neighbours and its own.

This ideology of death is not then the product of hope denied, but hope fed. Fed not just by money and arms from neighbours, but fed, above all, by the folly of the West. The hope that terror will bring concessions, the hope that the West is weakening, the hope that fanaticism will prevail, is daily reinforced. That hope is nurtured by movement towards a Palestinian state which is accelerated, not delayed, by bombing. It is encouraged by news that decisive action against one sponsor of terror, Iraq, has been delayed. It is supported by news that the world’s most energetic sponsor of terror, Iran, is to be appeased by the granting of EU trade privileges.

It is also advanced by the moral confusion which suicide bombing has produced among Western elites. The campaign has been designed to obscure the wickedness of ethnic mass murder by seeking to place the killer on the same moral plain as his targets — both are to be seen as “victims”.

But that is only true in the sense that a Khmer Rouge, Waffen SS or Interahamwe footsoldier and those he slaughters are “equally” victims of totalitarianism. One is implementing an ideology of death, the others are that ideology’s necessary sacrifices. To contextualise the acts of the killers by arguing that they have no hope, to see “nobility” in their blitheness about the consequences as they take others’ lives, is to locate moral reasoning in individuals who wish to erase the most fundamental moral principle — respect for life itself.

It is difficult for the civilised man or woman to admit that barbarism can take possession of a soul, or a society. But unless we do, we cannot stop its advance.

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[arthurus]

There are indeed approximately a billion Moslems, but less than 200 million of them are Arabs. Arabs are an ethnic group, not a religious one

Yes, I know the difference. I was writig quickly and should have typed Arabs/Moslems. There is not much significance to the distinction as all are/have been being radicalized. When a population becomes Moslem,(with a few exceptions) it loses its traditions and history and writes "arab" and "Quran" in the whited out spaces in its history books.