Cult of Death

Wretchard at Belmont Club quotes from an article in the London Times that discusses Muslims living in London:

Mobile phones are being used by young Muslims living in Britain to watch videos of hostages being beheaded by militants in Iraq. With their color screens and access to the internet, the latest generation of mobile phones are being used to download the videos after they are posted on Islamist websites. The videos can then be sent to other mobiles.

One militant has saved every available video of hostages being killed in Iraq. An Algerian in his thirties who has lived in London for almost ten years, he is a follower of Abu Hamza al-Masri, the cleric whose extradition is sought by the US ... said "for us the jihad is alive in our hands as we watch American infidels get their heads chopped off ... within a few minutes of the Americans dying last week I was watching them on my phone"

Wretchard cites this anecdote to highlight the futility of abandoning the war on terror, or turning it into a police action, as Senator Kerry proposes. These people are cruel, vicious, sick, and consumed with hatred for the West. They will not be stopped by a police investigation.

The article, however, summons another observation to mind. Muslim terrorists are sometimes said to be little different from, say, the Irish terrorists in Belfast. Both are motivated by religion, in one case Islam, in the other Christianity, and both use terror and murder as weapons to achieve religiously inspired aims.

The assumption is that religion of any kind can lead to horrors, but the comparison of the jihadis to the IRA is inapt. The Irish of the IRA or Sein Fein are not devout, pious men. Their religion is merely a social bond which gives them group identity. They don't invoke their devotion to Jesus Christ as their justification for their murders. They are thugs who use religion as an identifier like L.A. street gangs use race or the colors of their jackets.

The jihadis, on the other hand, are extremely devout, offering their crimes as a sacrifice to Allah and imploring his blessing upon their savagery. In their mind their viciousness and bloodthirstiness pleases God and gains them his favor. Everything they do they do in the name of Allah.

Another difference between the Irish terrorists and the Muslims is that the Irish could not take their Christianity seriously and still remain terrorists. The jihadis take their Islam very seriously, and because they do, they are murderers.

Their religion condones their depravity. What, then, are we to make of a belief system which encourages so many of its most fervent adherents to revel in death and butchery and others to remain passive and mute while such atrocities are carried out in the name of their faith?

There is a deep pathology associated with any religion which teaches that the unbeliever should have his head severed and that God will not only approve but reward the deed. There is a deep pathology in a religion which condones and encourages such hatred and which produces young men who delight so much in such horrific behavior that they collect videos of it.

Until Muslims do more than they are presently doing to demonstrate that the Islam we're seeing and reading about is not the genuine faith, until they begin to convince us that their version of God is not really just a gross perversion of the God of Christianity, we have every reason to insist that there be no room in the civilized world for what certainly appears to be a primitive, hate-drenched cult of death.

American Muslims have much work to do. We want to believe the best of them. We're listening.