Worldwide Java Jag: 2006-07-30

Friday, August 04, 2006

Martyrdom’s fakirs

A cult of death. Worship of death. Die to kill Jews. Sacrifice your life to resist Israel. As the numerous billboards in Tehran state, “I LOVE MOTHERHOOD BUT I LOVE MARTYRDOM MORE.” Across the Arab and Muslim world the stench of death worship hangs in the air. The hundreds of imams from eastern Pakistan to downtown Gaza exhort their flock to kill, maim, and die to further their cause…whatever cause. The slaughter, the mayhem, the death of children out to play in Baghdad, the maiming and death of train commuters in Mumbai, is justified, welcomed, and approved by Muslim clerics.
Twenty-four hours a day Arab television channels praise and exhort their brethren to kill and be killed. Jihad is both a Sunni and Shiite religious duty according to both the Wahhabis and the Shia. They may be at odds over the succession of Ali thirteen centuries ago, but they are clear about here and now…death to your fellow Muslims in Iraq, death to secular leaders in Egypt, death to blasphemous authors, death to Jews, death to America, death to Australian nightclubbers, death to your teenage daughter who has dated a boy…death death death. Give us a broadcast license and we’ll give you death.
It’s death in London, where some twenty percent of Muslims thought the bus and tube bombings were “justified.” It’s death in Tehran, where cadres march as state armies willing to die for Islam. It’s death in Riyadh, where imams condemn just about everything to…death. The entire south of Lebanon was a martyr’s living museum and the highest goal was to obtain paradise as a martyr for the “resistance.”
Beyond petro-politics, beyond Sunni-Shiite conflicts, beyond the Muslim-Christian divide, this death obsession stalks and corrodes the lands of the prophet. It is this worship and love of blood that separates Muslims into two camps. Those who want a better life for themselves and their children, and those who want to die. How else to explain the Gazan Palestinians who chose death over life, rockets over jobs, bombings over the beach? We need to wake up to the fact that Hamas and Hezbollah are powerful death cults with a policy wing. We need to understand that they want to die for Jihad more than own a bedroom set. The West needs to take them all at face value and at their word that their policy is death to those that they hate at the moment.
Their actions show they don’t care about anything but death and destruction. When some absurdly named Jihad brigade fires missiles across the Gazan border into Israel, they know the response will be harsh. Uprooted olive and orange trees, destroyed family compounds, wrecked towns and more homeless families with shattered lives. Does Hamas care? Not really, but it’s good for the propaganda value. They want to be destroyed; it’s the policy of Hamas to be under siege. They want to be in their bunkers; they don’t want to build factories and schools. We in the West cannot believe it. We in the West think no one would want to destroy their country and cause untold suffering. Our minds so set upon improvement every day in every way do not understand the power of religious hate.
But perhaps it is not true. Given a taste of martyrdom in South Gaza, the Hezbollah supporters showed true sorrow at the deaths of families and children. Given that the day before they were all anxious to be martyrs, it’s odd that when presented with the opportunity it’s a war crime, a crime against humanity. This is the old Goebbels conundrum. Joy and excitement at the destruction of London, exhortations of praise for the bombers of Trafalgar Square, outrage and fury at the return address delivered by the RAF that said Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin. As Olmert put it so well, every Israeli death is a celebration, every Arab one a tragedy. Backed by the fools and liars at Human Rights Watch the jihadists have become victims not perpetrators.
Until everyone realizes that nation-states like Iran can and will embrace the cult of martyrdom, and that armed with nuclear weapons they will have the means to carry out death on a mass level, the West will continue to dig its own grave. The fight in Lebanon is not a fight about Shebaa Farms or the return of two kidnapped soldiers; it is in fact a war against a death cult who would like nothing more than to blow every one of us up.