This is why...yes...perhaps the Islamists
This is why...yes...perhaps the Islamists can tell us all about the last time American servicemen walked into a mosque...and deliberately threw grenades at the worshippers bowing down before their God. More primitive monkeys willing to kill to defend the anthropomorphic honor of their holy rock.
In that vein, here is a thought-provoking Christian treatment of the reality and uses of violence, from J. Bottum. Commenting upon the work of René Girard, Bottum points out that our failure to appreciate the "sacrificial logic [of] mythic cultures" is not serving us well. The Christian sacrifice of Christ, he maintains, is an alternative to something. That "something" is the literal presence of sacrifice, human and otherwise, that formed the foundation stones of so many prior cultures, in the West and elsewhere.
What we are forgetting is that the Islamist conception of Muslim culture requires blood...human sacrifice. Muslims willing to die by slamming planes into buildings, by strapping explosives to their bodies, by hurling themselves into waiting Israeli guns. This is an ethos and a mythology that is not from the time of Muhammad; it is from the time long before, the time of tribes, and magic, and blood ritual.
The soft pacifism that is rearing its head, Bottum maintains, is acting as midwife to the re-birth of an ancient, dark culture, explicitly founded upon blood sacrifice. It is our duty to prevent this from happening, and to do that it is permissable to use the ancient, dark tools of violence.
What we are confronting is a culture that has not shed its explicit belief in the efficacy of human sacrifice. It is as if the Aztecs, instead of cutting out individual hearts with knives of obsidian, had developed nuclear weapons and satisfied the blood lust of their gods with tens of thousands of burnt offerings at a time.
Those among you who have been educated in today's anti-Western doctrines will point to the American foundation, built upon the blood of the aboriginal peoples of this land. This is true: our vision of Manifest Destiny allowed the westward expansion to proceed without regard for the lives of the Native Americans, and upon the backs of the Africans we brought here. However, as a culture, we have progressed. We recognize that these acts contradict the statements of our founding. These deeds are now decried, and are the cause of epic cultural battles. We recognize the need to atone, and we wage rhetorical war among ourselves over the form that our atonement should take. In short, we have recognized that the blood spilled upon our foundations cries out for justice and for recognition. And make no mistake: it was only through the most convoluted thinking that we were ever able to justify these acts, and they were never regarded as sacrifices demanded by God.
This is not so for our Islamist enemies. Blood is the intended wetting agent for the mortar of their cultural foundation. That is the difference between the World Trade Center and the bunker at Al-'Amariya. We, at least, try to avoid shedding the blood of innocents. Our enemies choose to shed it, with deliberate intent, and are morally motivated to do so as part of their religious and ethical worldview. Furthermore, they regard the sacrificial shedding of the blood of their own as necessary for the establishment of their chosen culture. They are trapped in a time before civilization, when gods walked the earth and demanded the lives of their subjects as tribute.
