Death Cult

The terrorist outrage in Russia last week and over this past weekend clearly displayed a number of things. The first, as if we had already not learned this from the hundreds of attacks in Israel, is that Islamofascists, like the Nazis that preceded them seek to specifically target children. After the slaughter of more than 150 children in a few hours, does anyone still doubt that these mass murderers are capable of doing anything? Each massacre is worse than the last. And what is the point of these attacks? Do these people really think that governments and people will be more amenable to their demands because of these murders? Of course there is the usual chorus from the left blaming ourselves for these acts of violence, and thus encouraging the terrorists. David Brooks addresses some of these questions.

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.

And yet, we refuse to see what this is about. And the Arab world refuses to confront their own degeneracy. We call them "militants", or "separatists" or other euphemisms, not bringing ourselves to use the words that would make us fight them.

I remember a couple of days after September 11 writing in some column or other that weepy candlelight vigils were a cop-out: the issue wasn't whether you were sad about the dead people but whether you wanted to do something about it. Three years on, that's still the difference. We can all get upset about dead children, but unless you're giving honest thought to what was responsible for the slaughter your tasteful elegies are no use. Nor are the hyper-rationalist theories about "asymmetrical warfare".
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The reality is that the IRA and ETA and the ANC and any number of secessionist and nationalist movements all the way back to the American revolutionaries could have seized schoolhouses and shot all the children.

But they didn't. Because, if they had, there would have been widespread revulsion within the perpetrators' own communities. To put it at its most tactful, that doesn't seem to be an issue here.

So the particular character of this "insurgency" does not derive from the requirements of "asymmetrical warfare" but from . . . well, let's see, what was the word missing from those three analyses of the Beslan massacre? Here's a clue: half the dead "Chechen separatists" were not Chechens at all, but Arabs. And yet, tastefully tiptoeing round the subject, The New York Times couldn't bring itself to use the words Muslim or Islamist, for fear presumably of offending multicultural sensibilities.

Until we call Hamas terrorists and not "militants", or see these Chechens as murderers and not "separatists", we are consigned to fight the phenomenon of terror as opposed to the terrorists themselves.