Thoughts on a CO-ED from NY Times

I was in a discussion about the Beslan attack recently, and interestingly most people only made one quick post saying: "I'm so sorry to hear that. This is such a heartbreaking story blah blah blah". And that was it for them. They probably won't look back at that thread and see all the opinions some people have to offer (myself included). Most interestingly, many people choose not to look at the Muslim connection in this incident, and in some cases, deny that such link exists.

Perhaps it's because it's remote to them. A little town in mid-Asia hardly seems to relate to anything in our lives. Perhaps it's because they choose to ignore because it was too brutal and too barbaric. Perhaps it's because they don't want to be reminded of the dark side of humanity.

Yet I suspect there's something else at work as well because our media is doing exactly the same thing, but brutality and violence ARE the media's favorites. So what's keeping them?

We live in an era of political correctness. We no longer can refer to idiots on Harley's as rednecks, because that's political incorrect (oops, look what I just did). We no longer can call people who abuse their bodies for money whores because they'll never be social acceptable unless we start calling them sexual workers (but who said that profession should be socially acceptable, anyway?). And now it seems we've been ban from calling these murders muslim extremists. Instead we need to call them political activist.

People avoid references to the muslim religion, and instead try to connect everything with politics. Because politics is something everybody hates and you can never go wrong by blaming politicans. On the other hand, the problems and threats the muslim world is posing to the rest of us today, although real, are too much to deal with and best avoided.

You may argue that the Chechen terrorists acted out of a political purpose, but you can never deny they used a method invented by the muslims fundimentalists. Which brings us to another interesting point - why are we calling the terrorists fundimentalists? Is what they do fundimental to the muslim religion?

Sadly, I think it is. Although if you ask me again in front of a microphone I probably won't admit. Saying such things in a world of political correctness will probably end up very badly. It doesn't matter if you're telling the truth or not. As long as you're politically correct you'll be fine.

So in the future when each and everyone of us is threaten by the muslim terrorists, we still must remember to call them religious activists.

[Original article below]

Cult of Death
By DAVID BROOKS

Published: September 7, 2004

We've been forced to witness the massacre of innocents. In New York, Madrid, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Baghdad and Bali, we have seen thousands of people destroyed while going about the daily activities of life.

We've been forced to endure the massacre of children. Whether it's teenagers outside an Israeli disco or students in Beslan, Russia, we've seen kids singled out as special targets.

We should by now have become used to the death cult that is thriving at the fringes of the Muslim world. This is the cult of people who are proud to declare, "You love life, but we love death." This is the cult that sent waves of defenseless children to be mowed down on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war, that trains kindergartners to become bombs, that fetishizes death, that sends people off joyfully to commit mass murder.

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.

We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don't want to stare into this abyss. We don't want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.

Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible targets for their rage.

The Boston Globe editorial, which was typical of the American journalistic response, made two quick references to the barbarity of the terrorists, but then quickly veered off with long passages condemning Putin and various Russian policy errors.

The Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened."

It wasn't a tragedy. It was a carefully planned mass murder operation. And it wasn't Russian authorities who stuffed basketball nets with explosives and shot children in the back as they tried to run away.

Whatever horrors the Russians have perpetrated upon the Chechens, whatever their ineptitude in responding to the attack, the essential nature of this act was in the act itself. It was the fact that a team of human beings could go into a school, live with hundreds of children for a few days, look them in the eyes and hear their cries, and then blow them up.

Dissertations will be written about the euphemisms the media used to describe these murderers. They were called "separatists" and "hostage-takers." Three years after Sept. 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil. They still try to rationalize terror. What drives the terrorists to do this? What are they trying to achieve?

They're still victims of the delusion that Paul Berman diagnosed after Sept. 11: "It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable."

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.