These killers are neither hopeless nor victims

Sympathy for suicide bombers is a sign of Western moral failure

by Michael Gove

June 25, 2002
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1055-337310,00.html
 
Jack Straw takes his cue from John Donne. Asked by The Times last 
week what lesson could be drawn from the killing of 20 Israelis 
by a Palestinian terrorist, the Foreign Secretary invited observers 
to feel "a degree of compassion" for suicide bombers. Any man's 
death diminishes me, Donne wrote, because I am involved in mankind. 
My colleague Matthew Parris takes his cue from another poet. 
In seeking to argue that there was something "ennobling" in the 
suicide bombers' self-sacrifice, he quoted from Horace - Dulce et 
decorum est pro patria mori. 

Both Parris and the Foreign Secretary are seeking to do what a 
certain type of civilised Englishman has long sought to do in 
the face of wickedness - bring the protagonists within the pale 
of civilised understanding. They, and Cherie Blair, urge us to 
feel the suicide bombers' pain. Consider yourself without hope, 
and imagine to what ends you might be driven. 

The cumulative effect of these interventions has been to make 
the "desperation" which "drives" these bombers to blow themselves 
up the central question for observers of the conflict in the 
Middle East. How, we are invited to ask, can we remove the 
"hopelessness" which leads to "self-sacrifice"? Powerful as this 
line of argument can be, it is also a profound, and dangerous, 
moral evasion. What these arguments evade is the reality of the 
bombers' motivation. 

Their acts are not expressions of despair or hopelessness, 
"cries for help" as the West has come to understand suicide. 
Nor are they the noble stands of outnumbered warriors, like the 
Spartans at Thermopylae, or Samson in the Temple. They are the 
calculated acts of men and women whose ideology celebrates death 
in a fashion which almost defies Western comprehension. Indeed, 
these acts are designed to elicit compassion in the West for the 
killers, a sentiment which the bombers know undermines the West's 
capacity to resist barbarism. 

The terrorist responsible for the bus bombing which killed 20 
Israelis last Wednesday, Mohammed al-Ghoul, was explicit in his 
motivation. "How beautiful it is to make my bomb shrapnel kill 
the enemy," he wrote immediately before he did just that, "how 
beautiful it is to kill and be killed." These are not the words 
of one in despair, but on the verge of exultation. 

Al-Ghoul was not a wretched, hopeless, outcast but a student 
pursuing a master's degree in Islamic studies. His act was not 
a cry for help but the culminating affirmation of an ideology 
which holds sway in the Palestinian Authority and other centres 
of Islamist fundamentalism across the world. It is an ideology 
inculcated in children from their earliest years. 

At a recent "graduation exercise" in a Gaza kindergarten children 
burnt an Israeli flag and a young girl had her hands dipped in 
red paint to celebrate the lynching of two Israeli soldiers. 
Another child dressed as the Hamas leader, Hassan Nasrallah, 
recited lines praising Hezbollah for its fight against the Israelis, 
a struggle that would win rewards "from above". Other children 
carried toy rifles. 

What, I wonder, is "ennobling" about such a ceremony? There is a 
moral gulf of almost unbridgeable proportions between the stand 
which we in the West can admire, of taking one’s life in one's 
hands against formidable odds, the stand of the rearguard action, 
of Horatio on the bridge or the Coldstreamers at Dunkirk, and the 
deliberate grooming of kindergarten children for their place in 
a death cult. 

This culture of death has not taken root in an arid desert of 
despair but a land irrigated by outside money. EU cash has helped 
to fund an education system which twists minds with anti-Jewish 
propaganda. The Saudis and Iraqis have created a perverted 
"welfare" system which rewards the families of suicide bombers 
with significant wealth. The Palestinian Authority has used its 
autonomy, and the period of negotiation which followed the Oslo 
agreement, to build an infrastructure. It is not, however, 
one of a state pledged to peace, but a society configured to 
kill. Both its Jewish neighbours and its own. 

This ideology of death is not then the product of hope denied, 
but hope fed. Fed not just by money and arms from neighbours, 
but fed, above all, by the folly of the West. The hope that 
terror will bring concessions, the hope that the West is weakening, 
the hope that fanaticism will prevail, is daily reinforced. 
That hope is nurtured by movement towards a Palestinian state 
which is accelerated, not delayed, by bombing. It is encouraged 
by news that decisive action against one sponsor of terror, 
Iraq, has been delayed. It is supported by news that the world's 
most energetic sponsor of terror, Iran, is to be appeased by 
the granting of EU trade privileges. 

It is also advanced by the moral confusion which suicide bombing 
has produced among Western elites. The campaign has been designed 
to obscure the wickedness of ethnic mass murder by seeking to 
place the killer on the same moral plain as his targets - both are 
to be seen as "victims". 

But that is only true in the sense that a Khmer Rouge, Waffen 
SS or Interahamwe footsoldier and those he slaughters are "equally" 
victims of totalitarianism. One is implementing an ideology of 
death, the others are that ideology’s necessary sacrifices. 
To contextualise the acts of the killers by arguing that they 
have no hope, to see "nobility" in their blitheness about the 
consequences as they take others' lives, is to locate moral 
reasoning in individuals who wish to erase the most fundamental 
moral principle - respect for life itself. 

It is difficult for the civilised man or woman to admit that 
barbarism can take possession of a soul, or a society. 
But unless we do, we cannot stop its advance.