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National NewsConservative News
Murderous Martyrs
By Joe Sobran
Posted on: August 2, 2006
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.
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":
Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight; But roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right.
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.
Everyone Has His Reasons, July 29, 2006.
Islam, a Religion of Peace-- or of Violence?, March 25, 2006.
Paris Muslims Riot, November 4, 2005.
Magnifying the Enemy, January 21, 2005.
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Joe Sobran is an author, syndicated columnist, and editor of a monthly newsletter, SOBRAN'S. See www.sobran.com for a free sample or call 800-513-5053. This article is reprinted with permission.
Copyright (c) 2006 by The Vere Company, All rights reserved.
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