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Editorial: Stand Up to Evil
The warning from Interior Minister Prince Naif that Saudi Arabia will pursue and punish those religious leaders who have instigated hate and terrorism through their preaching needs to be heeded by anyone who thinks that suicide bombings can be justified, here or anywhere.
| Still waiting for heads to roll... |
The exultation felt in the Arab world at the actions of Palestinian and Chechen suicide bombers has been deeply disturbing, not least because religious leaders have said time and again that such suicides are deeply sinful.
| Not many of them, and not very loudly. |
But quite apart from the religious aspect, these bombings are a political and military dead-end. They are a raging admission of failure. What have they achieved? Have the Israelis been shocked into negotiations? No way. Suicide bomb after suicide bomb has served only to harden Israeli hearts against compromise with the Palestinians, against accepting a Palestinian state, against dismantling the settlements. Have the Russians become more conciliatory as a result of Chechen attacks? Will Mondayâs massive truck bomb in Znamenskoye and Tuesdayâs slightly smaller one near Gudermes change opinions in Moscow? The Russian have been made more intransigent by attacks. In Sri Lanka too, where there have been more suicide bombings than anywhere else on earth, the consequence has been to entrench attitudes, to harden hearts, to prevent solutions. So why, here in the Arab world, is there this absurd view that suicide bombers have achieved something, done something noble? Why this replay of Japanâs kamikaze pilots at the end of World War II, cheered as they flew off to their death? They too were a last-ditch stand. They produced fear. They produced devastation for an instant. But they were a spectacular failure, both militarily and politically.
| Noticed that, did you? Somehow they keep happening, though, one after the other, whether they make sense or not. It's an Islamist trademark, something Islam can be noted for throughout all of subsequent history, kind of like lemmings are noted for their good sense... |
There is nothing noble about killing innocent people. As for the notion that the bombers are martyrs, that too is a lie. They are not that. Martyrdom has to do with standing up and dying for something that is good. To kill innocent people as well as yourself is an act of sheer evil. In Riyadh, Westerners, Saudis, Filipinos, and many others died. If anyone is the martyr, it is them, certainly not their murderers.
| But we never seem to see real condemnations of suicide bombings when the occur elsewhere, do we? Guess it depends on whose ox is being gored â or whose citizens are being turned into flying meat. |
Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2003-05-16 |
