September 12, 2006
The Horror
I just finished Martin Amis' essay "The Age of Horrorism", published in the September 10 edition of Britain's Observer.
This is possibly the single most profound description of the Islamist beast that I have ever read. It should put an utter end to the inexcusable, unforgivable tendency to look at "suicide-mass murder" as in any way explained by the actions of the West in general or the US in particular.
Below are selected quotes from the essay, which should be required reading for all. All emphases are mine.
"Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven't managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion... Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason."
So we are not. We are dealing with a foe who spurns all application of reason. Though reason is deeply broken by our fallen state, it is still capable of producing good and useful answers. But more than half of Muslims worldwide do not believe that 9/11 was carried out by Arabs.
"[Quoting Peter Berman's Terror and Liberalism:] 'Ah, yes, the horrendous massacres of civilians caused by the so-called suicide terrorists... Horrendous, yes, doubtless; condemnable, yes, doubtless, but Israel still has a lot to learn if it is not capable of understanding the reasons that can bring a human being to turn himself into a bomb.'"Palestinian society has channelled a good deal of thought and energy into the solemnisation of suicide-mass murder, a process which begins in kindergarten. Naturally, one would be reluctant to question the cloudless piety of the Palestinian mother who, having raised one suicide-mass murderer, expressed the wish that his younger brother would become a suicide-mass murderer too. But the time has come to cease to respect the quality of her 'rage' - to cease to marvel at the unhingeing rigour of Israeli oppression, and to start to marvel at the power of an entrenched and emulous ideology, and a cult of death. And if oppression is what we're interested in, then we should think of the oppression, not to mention the life-expectancy (and, God, what a life), of the younger brother. There will be much stopping and starting to do. It is painful to stop believing in the purity, and the sanity, of the underdog. It is painful to start believing in a cult of death, and in an enemy that wants its war to last for ever.
Suicide-mass murder is more than terrorism: it is horrorism. It is a maximum malevolence."
Maximum malevolence indeed. To be met with maximum loathing and maximum force.
"And this, on 25 July, was the considered response of the Mayor of London to the events of 7 July:"'Given that they don't have jet planes, don't have tanks, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In an unfair balance, that's what people use.'
"I remember a miserable little drip of a poem, c2002, that made exactly the same case. No, they don't have F-16s. Question: would the Mayor like them to have F-16s? And, no, their bodies are not what 'people' use. They are what Islamists use. And we should weigh, too, the spiritual paltriness of such martyrdoms. 'Martyr' means witness. The suicide-mass murderer witnesses nothing - and sacrifices nothing. He dies for vulgar and delusive gain. And on another level, too, the rationale for 'martyrdom operations' is a theological sophistry of the blackest cynicism. Its aim is simply the procurement of delivery systems."
I even largely agree with his assessment of the botched invasion of Iraq and the reasons behind our current administrations tragic miscalculations and mistakes. What makes this so tragic is not that the war didn't need to be fought but that it desperately needed to be won.
I have said it before, and doubtless I shall say it again: suicide-mass murder is perhaps the most exquisite expression of distilled evil that it is possible to conceive. The animals that do this are not men. They are not to be treated with dignity. They are not to be given any protections reserved for the civilized. They are not to be understood. They are not to be defended. They are not to be excused. They are to be killed as rapidly and as effectively as possible. Their motivations are utterly irrelevant and their actions must be opposed with maximum force and complete moral certitude.
When one hears of a suicide-mass murder one should not stop to evaluate the motivations and oppression that motivated the devil to do his work. The simple commission of the act should lead one to the immediate conclusion that this is a work that flies in the face of anything related to life, virtue, civilization, and humanity. If it does not so, your moral compass is quite possibly irretrievably broken. Any culture that cannot muster this response is dying or dead.
I've been sounding the "factory siren of disgust" for some time now and shall not stop doing so. This is repugnant on a visceral level, and I shall respond viscerally to it.
