http://washingtontimes.com/article/20071023/EDITORIAL/110230004/1013
In 1936, on the occasion of a speech by the nationalist Gen. Millan Astray at the University of Salamanca in Spain, the hall thundered with the general’s favorite motto: Viva La Muerte. “Long live death.” When the speech was over, Miguel de Unamuno, rector of the university, rose and said: “Just now I heard a necrophilious and senseless cry… this outlandish paradox is repellent to me.” Yet, this very same repellent cry is, today, the rallying call of jihadist “suicide” terrorists.
Again and again, rising as a lurid and dreadful incantation, we hear from these seemingly necrophilious foes, “We love death.” Jihadist terrorists retain a deeply felt willingness to oppose American and allied forces in every theater of conflict with “suicide” tactics. But why do we put the word “suicide” in quotation marks? The answer lies in an evident irony.
Terrorist “lovers of death” do not commit suicide in the expectation of an authentic death. Rather, as they believe that purposeful acts of “martyrdom” will actually assure them a blissful immortality, their “suicides” mock any pretense of heroism. Jihadists commit their “suicides” to assure eternal life. Islamist “suicides” represent not only barbarism, but also cowardice.
The Islamist terrorist lover of death fears much more than a true biological expiration here on earth. Paradoxically, he also abhors the idea of continuing with his physical life on this mundane planet. Often, apart from its central function to prepare the martyr for the next life, this terrestrial existence is deeply disdained and conspicuously loathed. Almost always, this life prohibits, inhibits and castigates the most compelling needs of the terrorist’s inborn human sexuality.
Current terrorism is not really about politics. Exploiting both meaning and eros, Islamist terrorist masterminds successfully prod young Muslim males to “sacrifice” themselves in the killing of “infidels” or other enemies of the faith. Curiously, the important link between Islamist terror violence and repressed male sexuality remains widely unrecognized. Regarding female suicide bombers, even less is understood.
Contrary to all conventional wisdom, even in the universities, anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Western Islamist terror has fundamentally nothing to do with material deprivation or ideological grievances. Terror violence is now only rarely produced by anger about some foreign policy issue or other. What genuinely animates Islamist “suicide” terror is the tangibly ecstatic promise of personal salvation through sacred acts of killing. It is. then, this particular redemptive promise that blocks the way to American and Western success in counter-terrorism at home and abroad. From a military standpoint, it is an incomparable offer that can never be countered with bombs or with “boots on the ground.”
The “suicide” murders of American and other men, women and children on September 11 stemmed from the same sentiments that now continue to make casualties of American soldiers, Iraqi civilians, British subjects and Israeli noncombatants. Consider, for example, the sentiments offered by one Jamal Abdel Hamid Yussef, openly explaining operations of the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades (military wing of Hamas in Gaza): “Our suicide operations are a message… that our people love death. Our goal is to die for the sake of God, and if we live we want to humiliate Jews and trample on their necks.” By “dying” in what is presumed to be the divinely mandated act of killing apostates, infidels, Americans or Jews (it makes no difference to “suicide” terrorists that these are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories), the Islamist “suicide” terrorist firmly believes that he can conquer his own death. In his clerically promised paradise of eternal life, there will be rivers of honey and ample numbers of virgins. This is a terrorist’s very literal expectation; by no means (as I discovered several years ago, in a personal interview with a failed Palestinian suicide-bomber), is it merely metaphor.
With the “One True Faith” on their side, the Islamist terrorists we now battle in Baghdad, Gaza and elsewhere see absolutely nothing self-destructive about their willful murder of “enemies.” For them, dreadful cowards immobilized by a pervasive fear of life as well as death, “suicide” is always only a momentary inconvenience on the (optimally, explosive) path to heaven. Here, in psychological terms, the insufferable death fear of terrorist ego is relieved by sacrifice of the “infidel” or “apostate.” Desperately, it is through the sacrificial burning and maiming and murder of a despised other that this frightened and frenzied figure seeks to buy his own perpetual freedom from real death.
In Washington, Jerusalem, London and other capitals, our leaders are now left to deal with an apparent oxymoron. What shall they do about a suicide that does not intend to end personal life, but rather to extend it forever? For American military forces in Iraq – just as for our remaining allies fighting similar battles in Europe and Israel – there is no point to deterring a jihadist enemy with deployments of more soldiers or with threats of crushing military power.
Such policies and postures will always fall on deaf ears. These prospects will never be received by our enemies with apprehension, but, instead, with a delirious cry of joy or even with a collective groan of fulfillment. Islamist terror is not about politics. It is about ecstasy.
To deter the Islamist suicide terrorist plotting now underway in Iraq, Israel, Europe and also the United States itself, we must confront this enemy with a tangible threat of real suicide. Let us recall that violence and the sacred remain inseparable for the Islamist suicide fighter. We should think, immediately, in terms of “desacrilizing” this enemy’s explicit inversions of holiness. Without thinking about how to accomplish this desacrilization, our war on terrorists who “love death” will remain based on narrowly operational grounds. Then we would surely fail.
Louis Rene Beres, an author, is a professor of international law at Purdue University.
