Do you know what Islamic Jihad really is?

[Air Force Cane]

Ralph Peters- Weekly Standard

Not a single item in our trillion-dollar arsenal can compare with the genius of the suicide bomber--the breakthrough weapon of our time. Our intelligence systems cannot locate him, our arsenal cannot deter him, and, all too often, our soldiers cannot stop him before it is too late. A man of invincible conviction--call it delusion, if you will--armed with explosives stolen or purchased for a handful of soiled bills can have a strategic impact that staggers governments. Abetted by the global media, the suicide bomber is the wonder weapon of the age.

The suicide bomber's willingness to discard civilization's cherished rules for warfare gives him enormous strength. In the Cain-and-Abel conflicts of the 21st century, ruthlessness trumps technology. We refuse to comprehend the suicide bomber's soul--even though today's wars are contests of souls, and belief is our enemy's ultimate order of battle. We write off the suicide bomber as a criminal, a wanton butcher, a terrorist. Yet, within his spiritual universe, he's more heroic than the American soldier who throws himself atop a grenade to spare his comrades: He isn't merely protecting other men, but defending his god. The suicide bomber can justify any level of carnage because he's doing his god's will. We agonize over a prisoner's slapped face, while our enemies are lauded as heroes for killing innocent masses (even of fellow believers). We continue to narrow our view of warfare's acceptable parameters even as our enemies amplify the concept of total war.

Islamist terrorists, to cite the immediate example, would do anything

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to win.

Our enemies act on ecstatic revelations from their god. We act on the advice of lawyers. It is astonishing that we have managed to hold the line as well as we have.

The ultimate precision weapon, the suicide bomber simultaneously redefines the scope of "legitimate" targets. Delighted to kill our troops, this implacable enemy who regards death as a promotion is equally ready to slaughter men, women, and children of unknown identity who have done him no harm. His force of will towers over our own. He cannot win wars on the traditional battlefields we cherish, but his commitment and actions transcend such tidy limits. In the moment of his deed, the suicide bomber is truly larger than life. The world's a stage, and every suicide bomber is, at least briefly, a star.

We will develop the means to defeat the majority of, if not all, improvised explosive devices. But the suicide bomber--the living, thinking assassin determined to die--may prove impossible to stop. Even if we discover a means to identify him at a distance from our troops, he has only to turn to easier targets. Virtually anything the suicide bomber attacks brings value to his cause--destruction of any variety is a victory. The paradox is that his act of self-destruction is also an undeniable assertion that "I am," as he becomes the voice from below that the mighty cannot ignore. We are trained to think in terms of cause and effect--but the suicide bomber merges the two. The gesture and the result are inseparable from and integral to his message. Self-destruction and murder join to become the ultimate act of self-assertion.

And his deed is heralded, while even our most virtuous acts are condemned around the world. Even in the days before mass media, assassins terrorized civilizations. Today, their deeds are amplified by a toxic, breathtakingly irresponsible communications culture that spans the globe. Photogenic violence is no longer a local affair--if a terrorist gives the media picturesque devastation, he reaches the entire planet. We cannot measure the psychological magnification, although we grasp it vaguely. And the media's liturgical repetition of the suicide bomber's act creates an atmosphere of sacrament. On a primal level, the suicide bomber impresses even his enemies with his conviction. We hasten to dismiss his deed as a perversion, yet it resounds as a vivid act of faith. Within his own cultural context, people may hate what the suicide bomber does, yet revere his sacrifice (and, too often, they do not hate what he does).

We may refuse to accept it, but suicide bombing operates powerfully on practical, emotional, and spiritual levels--and it generates dirt-cheap propaganda. To the Muslim world, the suicide bomber's act is a proof of faith that ensnares the mind with a suspicion of his righteousness. He is a nearly irresistible champion of the powerless, the Middle East's longed-for superhero, the next best thing to the Mahdi or the Twelfth Imam.

We praise Nathan Hale's willingness to die for his cause. Now imagine thousands of men anxious to die for theirs. The suicide bomber may be savage, brutal, callous, heartless, naive, psychotic, and, to us, despicable, but within his milieu he is also heroic.

The hallmark of our age is the failure of belief systems and a subsequent flight back to primitive fundamentalism--and the phenomenon isn't limited to the Middle East. Faith revived is running roughshod over science and civilization. Secular societies appear increasingly fragmented, if not fragile. The angry gods are back. And they will not be defeated with cruise missiles or computer codes.

[Air Force Cane]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/649qrsob.asp

A paradox of our time is that the overwhelmingly secular global media--a collection of natural-born religion-haters--have become the crucial accomplices of the suicide bomber fueled by rabid faith. Mass murderers are lionized as freedom fighters, while our own troops are attacked by the press they protect for the least waywardness or error. One begins to wonder if the bomber's suicidal impulse isn't matched by a deep death wish affecting the West's cultural froth. (What if Darwin was right conceptually, but failed to grasp that homo sapiens' most powerful evolutionary strategy is faith?) Both the suicide bomber and the "world intellectual" with his reflexive hatred of America exist in emotional realms that our rational models of analysis cannot explain. The modern age's methods for interpreting humanity are played out.

We live in a new age of superstition and bloodthirsty gods, of collective madness. Its icons are the suicide bomber, the veil, and the video camera.

One of the most consistently disheartening experiences an adult can have today is to listen to the endless attempts by our intellectuals and intelligence professionals to explain religious terrorism in clinical terms, assigning rational motives to men who have moved irrevocably beyond reason. We suffer under layers of intellectual asymmetries that hinder us from an intuitive recognition of our enemies. Our rear-guard rationalists range from those convinced that every security problem has a technological solution, if only it can be found, to those who insist that members of al Qaeda and its affiliates are motivated by finite, comprehensible, and logical ambitions that, if satisfied, would make our problems disappear.

Living in unprecedented safety within our borders and lacking firsthand knowledge of the decay beyond, honorable men and women have convinced themselves that Osama bin Laden's professed goals of driving the United States from the Middle East and removing corrupt regional governments are what global terror is all about. They gloss over his ambition of reestablishing the caliphate and his calls for the destruction of Israel as rhetorical effects--when they address them at all. Yet, Islamist fanatics are more deeply committed to their maximalist goals than to their lesser ones--and their unspoken ambitions soar beyond logic's realm. Religious terrorists are committed to an apocalypse they sense within striking distance. Their longing for union with god is inseparable from their impulse toward annihilation. They seek their god in carnage, and will go on slaughtering until he appears to pat them on the back.

A dangerous asymmetry exists in the type of minds working the problem of Islamist terrorism in our government and society. On average, the "experts" to whom we are conditioned to listen have a secular mentality (even if they go to church or synagogue from habit). And it is a very rare secular mind that can comprehend religious passion--it's like asking a blind man to describe the colors of fire. One suspects that our own fiercest believers are best equipped to penetrate the mentality--the souls--of our Islamist enemies, although those believers may not be as articulate as the secular intellectuals who anxiously dismiss all possibilities that lie outside their theoretical constructs.

Those who feel no vital faith cannot comprehend faith's power. A man or woman who has never been intoxicated by belief will default to mirror-imaging when asked to describe terror's roots. He who has never experienced a soul-shaking glimpse of the divine inevitably explains religion-driven suicide bombers in terms of a lack of economic opportunity or social humiliation. But the enemies we face are burning with belief, on fire with their vision of an immanent, angry god. Our intelligentsia is less equipped to understand such men than our satellites are to find them.

All of our technologies and comforting theories are confounded by the strength of the soul ablaze with faith. Our struggle with Islamist terror (other religious terrors may haunt our descendants) has almost nothing to do with our actions in the Middle East. It's about a failing civilization's embrace of a furious god.

We are not (yet) at war with Islam, but the extreme believers within Islam are convinced that they are soldiers in a religious war against us. Despite their rhetoric, they are the crusaders. Even our conceptions of the struggle are asymmetrical. Despite the horrors we have witnessed, we have yet to take religious terrorists seriously on their own self-evident terms. We invaded a succession of their tormented countries, but haven't come close to penetrating their souls. The hermetic universe of the Islamist terrorist is immune to our reality (if not to our bullets), but our intellectuals appear equally incapable of accepting the religious extremist's reality.

We have no tools of persuasion effective against a millenarian belief. What logic can we wield against the soul fortified by faith and barricaded beyond argument? Even if we understood every nuance of our enemy's culture, the suicide bomber's intense faith and the terror chieftain's visions have burned through native cultural restraints. We are told, rather smugly, that the Koran forbids suicide. But our enemies are not concerned with how we read their faith. Religions are living things, and ultra-extremists are improvising a new and savage cult within Islam--even as they proclaim their return to a purified faith.

Security-wise, we have placed our faith in things, in bright (and expensive) material objects. But the counterrevolution in military affairs is based on the brilliant intuition that our military can be sidestepped often enough to challenge its potency. Certainly, we inflict casualties on our enemies--and gain real advantages from doing so--but we not only face an enemy who, as observed above, views death as a promotion, but also one who believes he has won even when he loses. If the suicide bomber completes his mission, he has won. But even if he is killed or dies short of his target, he has conquered a place in paradise. Which well-intentioned information operation of ours can compete with the conviction that a martyr's death leads to eternal joy?

Again, our intelligentsia falls woefully short. The most secularized element of our society--educated to avoid faith (or, at the very least, to shun enthusiastic, vigorous, proud, and public faith)--our professional thinkers have lost any sense of a literal paradise beyond the grave. But our enemies enjoy a faith as vivid as did our ancestors, for whom devils lurked in the undergrowth and paradise was an idealized representation of that which mortals knew. We are taught that we should never underestimate our enemies--yet, we underestimate the power of his faith, his most potent weapon.

Nor should we assume that Islamist extremists will remain the only god-haunted terrorists attacking established orders. This century may prove to be one of multi-sided struggles over the interpretation of god's will, between believers and unbelievers, between the varieties of the faithful, between monotheists and polytheists, between master faiths and secessionist movements, between the hollow worshippers of science and those swollen with the ecstasy of belief.

Naturally, we view the cardinal struggle as between the West and extremists within the Islamic world; yet, the bloodiest religious warfare of the coming decades may be between Sunni and Shia Muslims, or between African Muslims and the new, sub-Saharan Church Militant. Hindu extremists gnaw inward from the epidermis of Indian society, while even Buddhist monks have engaged in organized violence in favor of their ostensibly peaceable faith. In a bewildering world where every traditional society is under assault from the forces of global change, only religion seems to provide a reliable refuge. And each god seems increasingly a jealous god.

Faith is the great strategic factor that unbelieving faculties and bureaucracies ignore. It may be the crucial issue of this century. And we cannot even speak about it honestly. Give me a warrior drunk with faith, and I will show you a weapon beyond the dreams of any laboratory. Our guided bombs may kill individual terrorists, but the terrorist knows that our weapons can't kill his god.

[redphoenix]

I thought that "suicide bombers" were a by-product of the educational systems that program them to kill all non muslims and to kill the infidels with America being at the top of the list .

[webnarc]

The hallmark of our age is the failure of belief systems and a subsequent flight back to primitive fundamentalism--and the phenomenon isn't limited to the Middle East. Faith revived is running roughshod over science and civilization. Secular societies appear increasingly fragmented, if not fragile. The angry gods are back. And they will not be defeated with cruise missiles or computer codes.

This is terrifingly true. As a non-believer I was appalled to read about intelligent design and the blind endosements it recieves because it isn't science. There seems to be an anti-intellectual movement afoot and Ralph Peters nails it right here.

[Air Force Cane]

I think there is a big difference between the small numbers of people who believe in intelligent design

and the belief that you will get 72 virgins in paradise if you murder a Sikh/Hindu/Jew/Christian..

would you not agree?

[webnarc]

I think there is a big difference between the small numbers of people who believe in intelligent design

and the belief that you will get 72 virgins in paradise if you murder a Sikh/Hindu/Jew/Christian..

would you not agree?

They are more similar to each other than they are to not believing in a God because delusion is at the core of both beliefs.

I agree with you, thinking that you'll get 72 virgins when you murder someone is freaken crazy.

[Midnight Judges]

Wow, Ralph Peters must be a huge Senator Joe McCarthy fan because he employs all the same tactics. Religious Persecution, attacking fellow Americans in the name of patriotism, and using fear tactics/exaggeration and emotions to manipulate your reader.

Suicide bombing is not new to our generation.

Intellectuals are not against killing the terrorists regardless of what Mr. Peters tries to claim are the opinions of the educated.

Saying that only hard-core Christians can understand the Jihad is borderline ludicrous.

[AlexRS]

(What if Darwin was right conceptually, but failed to grasp that homo sapiens' most powerful evolutionary strategy is faith?)

Faith is not an evolutionary strategy... Our brain is. Weak and cold, we had to rely on our brain to survive. The Brain came with a downside - we had to answer questions we would not otherwise ask. This is where religion comes in.

Both the suicide bomber and the "world intellectual" with his reflexive hatred of America exist in emotional realms that our rational models of analysis cannot explain.

How can one tell if something is backed up by logic or if something exists in purely emotional realm? Things like "reflexive hatered" or suicide bombings are clearly from the emotional realm. What about "world intellectuals" that can rationally and logically explain how they view America? what if they do not have "reflexive hatered" but a mere dislike of America based on evidence they see? Rational models of analysis can explain that. These people will not get emotional if you question their position! The opinion is in the "emotional realm" if questioning it arises strong emotion in the holder. If YOU get emotional when your views are questioned - you need to re-examine them.

One of the most consistently disheartening experiences an adult can have today is to listen to the endless attempts by our intellectuals and intelligence professionals to explain religious terrorism in clinical terms, assigning rational motives to men who have moved irrevocably beyond reason.

This is just plain wrong. Nobody is assigning rational motives to them! They have no rational motives, they are not rational!!! Searching for rational explanations of actions does not imply that actions are rational. There is nothing rational about suicide bombers, yet modern psychology is very able to rationally explain how these people got there.

Our rear-guard rationalists range from those convinced that every security problem has a technological solution, if only it can be found, to those who insist that members of al Qaeda and its affiliates are motivated by finite, comprehensible, and logical ambitions that, if satisfied, would make our problems disappear.

Yeah, those "smart rationalists" think we can "satisfy" al Queda and they would leave us alone! This is pretty rediculous. Not a single thinking person would agree with this.

Living in unprecedented safety within our borders and lacking firsthand knowledge of the decay beyond, honorable men and women have convinced themselves that Osama bin Laden's professed goals of driving the United States from the Middle East and removing corrupt regional governments are what global terror is all about.

No ACF. Honorable men and women do not believe what the terrorists say. They think terrorism is about terrorism. We do not believe whatever goals are publically stated by terrorists.

A dangerous asymmetry exists in the type of minds working the problem of Islamist terrorism in our government and society. On average, the "experts" to whom we are conditioned to listen have a secular mentality (even if they go to church or synagogue from habit). And it is a very rare secular mind that can comprehend religious passion--it's like asking a blind man to describe the colors of fire. One suspects that our own fiercest believers are best equipped to penetrate the mentality--the souls--of our Islamist enemies, although those believers may not be as articulate as the secular intellectuals who anxiously dismiss all possibilities that lie outside their theoretical constructs.

Fundamentally flawed argiment. The beauty of theoretical constructs is that they are not limited. They are theoretical, which means any construct can be made. "Secular intellectuals" love opportunities to theoretically construct something new. Their approach is not that of a "I know it all," but that of a "I know nothing."

- They are big believers!

- Yes I know, they can and will do anything for their belief...

- But you do not understand, they are HUGE believers!

- Yes I know, they can even die for their beliefs with ease

- YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND, THEY REALLY DO BELIEF!!

- Even die for it, huh?

- YEAH, HOW BOUT THAT!!! Now you are getting it!!! Trust me, I know what it is like!!!

Those who feel no vital faith cannot comprehend faith's power.

Those who feel no vital faith in what? Talking about the general feeling of faith, or faith in God? Any particular God?

A man or woman who has never been intoxicated by belief will default to mirror-imaging when asked to describe terror's roots. He who has never experienced a soul-shaking glimpse of the divine inevitably explains religion-driven suicide bombers in terms of a lack of economic opportunity or social humiliation. But the enemies we face are burning with belief, on fire with their vision of an immanent, angry god. Our intelligentsia is less equipped to understand such men than our satellites are to find them.

This is again untrue. Stop trying to discount opinions of "intelligent people." They understand perfectly well that "economic opportunity or social humiliation" is what gets terrorists there. From there on they experience "soul-shaking glimpse of the divine." Our intelligentsia is equipped to understand such men.

but our intellectuals appear equally incapable of accepting the religious extremist's reality.

See above.

What logic can we wield against the soul fortified by faith and barricaded beyond argument?

INDEED

Again, our intelligentsia falls woefully short. The most secularized element of our society--educated to avoid faith (or, at the very least, to shun enthusiastic, vigorous, proud, and public faith)--our professional thinkers have lost any sense of a literal paradise beyond the grave.

Yeah, intelligent people just do not get it.

Naturally, we view the cardinal struggle as between the West and extremists within the Islamic world; yet, the bloodiest religious warfare of the coming decades may be between Sunni and Shia Muslims, or between African Muslims and the new, sub-Saharan Church Militant. Hindu extremists gnaw inward from the epidermis of Indian society, while even Buddhist monks have engaged in organized violence in favor of their ostensibly peaceable faith. In a bewildering world where every traditional society is under assault from the forces of global change, only religion seems to provide a reliable refuge. And each god seems increasingly a jealous god.

There will be extremists in every religion. Apperently even Buddhism (which is most surprising - I wonder what he is referring to). The religion itself cannot be judged based on extremists.

Give me a warrior drunk with faith, and I will show you a weapon beyond the dreams of any laboratory.

Drunk with any particular faith??? Your faith? Does it have to be your faith?

AFC, if you really belive this... please take a step back. Go to a confession or something. Speak to a priest. There is much hate in you and it is time to slowly start letting go of it.

You have become the extremist. You have become the very thing you despise, blind in your faith and your hatered. Extremism is what causes all the suffering. Fight fire with fire and everything gets burned.

[Air Force Cane]

wow Alex- you sure have all the right answers.

of course if you would have read the entire thread- you would have realized that IT WAS AN ARTICLE BY RALPH PETERS- NOT MY ORIGINAL BELIEFS.

I am far from a Christian Fundamentalist, seeing as how I am JEWISH.

but thanks for the insults :cool:

[Air Force Cane]

try reading from the first post where I typed:

'Ralph Peters- Weekly Standard' at the very top :laugh:

[Destino]

The tone of that writing is odd. On the one hand it seems the writer is very upset with the "intelligentsia" for underestimating and under demonizing the religious enemy we face. On the other handthe writer seems to openly admire the enemy and his self destructive belief.

I tend to think that the western world doesn't want to admit what we are at war with. We like to tell ourselves we are facing a handful of whackos, and when the problem is presented in that manner the logical conclusion is that we need only to find this small group and eradicate it.

The problem I think is that regional culture is creating the terrorist. The promotion of hatred in schools and religion is the factory that spits out these weapons.

[Chief skin]

"Beware of false prophetss there will be many" This BS religion is no different then the sick cults that spring up from time to time. They can spin it, call it anythig they want in the end they condone killing and murder. The law that God gave to Moses states

Thou shall not kill. When their time comes to meet their maker These killers will have to answer for their actions.

[AlexRS]

wow Alex- you sure have all the right answers.

of course if you would have read the entire thread- you would have realized that IT WAS AN ARTICLE BY RALPH PETERS- NOT MY ORIGINAL BELIEFS.

I am far from a Christian Fundamentalist, seeing as how I am JEWISH.

but thanks for the insults :cool:

hehe sorry, that's what I get for replying in a hurry.

Not much here as far as insults... this kind of a shortsighted position can be ridiculed much more thoroughly

Any claim that "intelligent people just do not get it" is basically an invitation to accept some position without questioning it. Do not worry about merits of this position, do not question it! All of THEM would question it, but they just do not get it.

No, I do not have all the answers. I do, however, have a strong suspicion that somebody discounting all rational thought would do so for a less-than-noble reason.

[AlexRS]

On the other handthe writer seems to openly admire the enemy and his self destructive belief.

Yeah, that was pretty interesting. "Give me a warrior drunk with faith, and I will show you a weapon beyond the dreams of any laboratory." Sounds like he is annoyed with our "techno gadget" weaponry and wishing for more faith-based weaponry.

I tend to think that the western world doesn't want to admit what we are at war with. We like to tell ourselves we are facing a handful of whackos, and when the problem is presented in that manner the logical conclusion is that we need only to find this small group and eradicate it.

The problem I think is that regional culture is creating the terrorist. The promotion of hatred in schools and religion is the factory that spits out these weapons.

Yeah, we like to think that we are facing a handful of whackos that we need to eliminate. It would help if we stopped to think where these whackos come from and went after the source. It is like a bell curve, where certain parts of the graph fall into the extremist sides. You can cut off the sides, but that won't change anything. You need to move the whole graph. There will still be extremists (we still have Cults here in US, for example), but they will not as much of a PITA.