Islam's Worshippers of Death

Alan Dershowitz, over at the Wall Street Journal, provides a powerful contrast between the cultures of Islam and the West on life, death, and conventional warfare:

Zahra Maladan is an educated woman who edits a women's magazine in Lebanon. She is also a mother, who undoubtedly loves her son. She has ambitions for him, but they are different from those of most mothers in the West. She wants her son to become a suicide bomber.

At the recent funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya -- the mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than 100 women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 -- Ms. Maladan was quoted in the New York Times giving the following warning to her son: "if you're not going to follow the steps of the Islamic resistance martyrs, then I don't want you."

Zahra Maladan represents a dramatic shift in the way we must fight to protect our citizens against enemies who are sworn to kill them by killing themselves. The traditional paradigm was that mothers who love their children want them to live in peace, marry and produce grandchildren. Women in general, and mothers in particular, were seen as a counterweight to male belligerence. The picture of the mother weeping as her son is led off to battle -- even a just battle -- has been a constant and powerful image.

Now there is a new image of mothers urging their children to die, and then celebrating the martyrdom of their suicidal sons and daughters by distributing sweets and singing wedding songs. More and more young women -- some married with infant children -- are strapping bombs to their (sometimes pregnant) bellies, because they have been taught to love death rather than life. Look at what is being preached by some influential Islamic leaders:

"We are going to win, because they love life and we love death," said Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He has also said: "[E]ach of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah." Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden told a reporter: "We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us."

Yes, that is a big difference between Islam and the West.

That's why is so frustrating sometimes to hear spokemen for the antiwar left denounce the administration and war backers as "hyping" the terrorist threat, or to see the anti-Bush hordes descend to cultural relativism when confronted with Islamic totalitarianism in the form of 12 year-old Taliban boys beheading hostages.

There's a lot of talk about "reaching out to moderate Muslims" in our ongoing policy debates on how best to respond to radical Islam.

I think that's an important component to our overall anti-terror policies in an age of fanatical violence.

But Dershowitz is less for reaching out than he is for eradicating the scourge of Islam's death worship:

The traditional sharp distinction between soldiers in uniform and civilians in nonmilitary garb has given way to a continuum. At the more civilian end are babies and true noncombatants; at the more military end are the religious leaders who incite mass murder; in the middle are ordinary citizens who facilitate, finance or encourage terrorism. There are no hard and fast lines of demarcation, and mistakes are inevitable -- as the terrorists well understand.

We need new rules, strategies and tactics to deal effectively and fairly with these dangerous new realities. We cannot simply wait until the son of Zahra Maladan -- and the sons and daughters of hundreds of others like her -- decide to follow his mother's demand. We must stop them before they export their sick and dangerous culture of death to our shores.

I would also remind readers that Islam's doctrinally a "religion of victory," and if one interprets Islamic theology strictly, the Muslim faith sees itself as being ultimately victorious in the world's (often unspoken) battle for divine supremacy. As Malise Ruthven has written:

In the majority Sunni tradition this sense of supremacy was sanctified as much by history as by theology. In the first instance, the truth of Islam was vindicated on the field of battle. As Hans Küng acknowledges in Islam: Past, Present and Future—his 767-page overview of the Islamic faith and history, seen from the perspective of a liberal Christian theologian—Islam is above all a "religion of victory." Muslims of many persuasions—not just the self-styled jihadists—defend the truth claims of their religion by resorting to what might be called the argument from manifest success.

According to this argument, the Prophet Muhammad overcame the enemies of truth by divinely assisted battles as well as by preaching. Building on his victories and faith in his divine mission, his successors, the early caliphs, conquered most of western Asia and North Africa as well as Spain. In this view the truth of Islam was vindicated by actual events, through Islam's historical achievement in creating what would become a great world civilization.

The argument from manifest success is consonant with the theological doctrine according to which Islam supersedes the previous revelations of Judaism and Christianity. Jews and Christians are in error because they deviated from the straight path revealed to Abraham, ancestral patriarch of all three faiths. Islam "restores" the true religion of Abraham while superseding Judeo-Christianity as the "final" revelation. The past and the future belong to Islam even if the present makes for difficulties.

Hmm, food for thought for those who argue that Iraq's been a diversion from the war on terror.