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Murderous Martyrs
 Nearly
everyone but a few hard-line
Zionists, many of them Christian, seems to agree that the harsh Israeli
response to Hezbollah’s rocket attack from Lebanon has been
“disproportionate,” an
“overreaction.”  Well,
maybe. It’s certainly been bloody and frightening.
But given
the premises of the nation-state, just what were the Israelis supposed to
do? How do you calculate “proportion” in cases like this? If a
state is supposed to protect its own subjects, precision in such a situation is
nearly impossible to specify or achieve, and Hezbollah (the Army of Allah)
was obviously counting on this. When it fired its rockets, it was dealing death
as surely — and as cruelly — to innocent Muslims in Lebanon as to
Jews in Israel.
Even those
of us who have been skeptical and suspicious toward Israel, as I have, can
only be revolted by such merciless enemies. They can neither be reasoned
with nor threatened, and killing them seems only to make them multiply. The
simplest tactics of terrorism can put its targets into impossible positions.
Not only
Israel but the Western world is dealing with something new to us: the
murderous martyr, the man who is willing to die in order to kill for his cause.
Such a man is a human conundrum. How on earth do you deal with him?
Think of
the man who kills his wife and children, then shoots himself. His neighbors
wonder if it could have been prevented, but can only wring their hands
helplessly afterward and ask how it ever came to this point. What
unfathomable hatred makes people do such things?
All of which
makes democracy seem a feeble prescription for evaporating the volcanic
discontents of the Middle East. On the contrary, democracy in Gaza and
Lebanon has only complicated the chaos, allowing Hamas and Hezbollah to add
political power to their arsenals. Nor has American-sponsored democracy
brought peace to Iraq.
Once again
the United States has plunged into a part of the world that seems like a
baffling alternative universe. “These people don’t understand
anything but force,” we say, and after all we have plenty of force. But
they think the same thing about the infidel: that all we understand is the
deadly universal language of terror and torture.
![[Breaker quote for Murderous Martyrs: Dying to kill]](2006breakers/060718.gif) Europe’s
old religious wars, bloody as they
were, seem like family disagreements compared with the conflicts of the
Middle East. The first European settlers came here to escape them.
Centuries later, Jews migrated to Palestine to escape European persecution.
But the scattered native tribes of North America proved easier to subdue
than the Muslim Arabs, united (up to a point) by faith. After more than half a
century, Israel is far from the safe haven its founders hoped it would be.
It’s
all very well to call Islam a “religion of peace,” but that seems
to depend on who is practicing it. Does the Koran have passages urging its
votaries to forgive their enemies, to turn the other cheek, and to pray for
those who persecute them? If so, these injunctions are not widely known.
On the
contrary, one gets the impression that Islam is the fighting faith par
excellence, a religion of the avenging sword. (Tom Jones’s tutor,
Thwackum, “was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to
heaven.”) Today’s Islamic terrorists may not be typical, but
they seem to be normative and predominant in the Muslim world. It
doesn’t take many fanatics to set the tone for a whole society,
especially when they are honored as martyrs.
It may
seem paradoxical to us that murderers should be honored at all, but
it’s a big world, and different religions seem strange and savage to
each other. Think of Hilaire Belloc’s epigram “The
Pacifist”:
When the
West called itself Christendom, the Muslims learned to think of Christians as
“Crusaders,” a term that unhappily persists to this day. And at
this point the Middle East still seems inhospitable to interfaith comity and to
seeing the other fellow’s point of view.
It’s
a little late in the day for Americans to have second thoughts about invading
the Muslim world; the only question is whether it’s far too late.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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