The Laughter in the Dark
I've copied a couple of the better comments to this belmontclub post.
The AP reports that "a car bomb blasted through a busy bus station near one of Iraq's holiest shrines Saturday and killed at least 56 people, police and hospital officials said. The bus station bombing occurred about 200 yards from the Imam Hussein shrine in Karbala, where the grandson of Islam's Prophet Muhammad is buried — one of the most important sites for Shiites."
Implicit in the enemy use of these tactics is the presumption that its political target has a moral sensibility -- that it somehow cares about the threat to kill innocents unless it bends to their evil will. Otherwise it would not be affected. Blackmail is useless against those who don't care for the victims because there can be no assault on the sensibility of the insensible. Pity and virtue are treated as weakness -- but only by evil -- by those who hate pity, and hate it from pride.
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But still more evil than terrorists are those who help them in projecting a moral inversion. For terrorists are themselves fully cognizant of the difference between innocence and guilt. It is this fine sensibility that allows terrorists to design one outrage greater than the other; that teaches it to seek out the child that they might mutilate it. Lucifer would have been a poor devil had he not the memory of an angel. But their apologists have no sense of evil; and are in some way morally inferior to the terrorists themselves. They have no memory of Paradise Lost. Darkness and light are all the same to them; or rather darkness is light and night their shade of preference. For the apologists of terror, the victims themselves are "little Eichmanns" and those who try to defend the victims blamed instead of the murderers. And not only do they believe this but will try to persuade anyone who will listen of its truth. The phrase "lost soul" is not just a metaphor but a diagnosis.
How can anyone leave the field to such evil? Or think that we could, by giving it victory, escape it ourselves?
POSTED BY WRETCHARD AT 4/14/2007
Wu Wei said...
Al Qaeda had a rotten day
Al Qaeda is an utter failure. Most of their "surge" failed. More importantly, we now see that they can't even try to do anything besides suicide bombings, which proves they are a failure. Al Qaeda can't hold territory. They can't run for office. They can't plant their flag anywhere. Instead they cower in caves and sewers, unable to do anything besides ask civilians to kill civilians. Al Qaeda can't peacefully persuade anyone to follow them, and in fact the Iraqi Sunnis recently turned against them.
As for the Iraqi Parliament bombing, it mostly failed. The US had intelligence reports before the bombing took place, and increased security. That foiled most of the attack. As an Iraqi at the bombing scene said, AQ bombed a mostly deserted cafeteria. If they had launched the bomb in the assembly hall a few minutes earlier, they could have taken out most of the parliament. Indeed, it was later reported that unexploded explosives were found and detonated in a controlled blast. In summary, Al Qaeda bombed the wrong room, most of its explosives didn't work, and there were leaks from inside their organization.
It is also important to remember that several ministers of parliament have been arrested and had their houses searched because of being part of terrorist organizations. Large amounts of weapons were found. So it shouldn't be shocking that a terrorist group managed to get something into the parliament.
This shows how the MSM hates America by always twists the truth to try and say America is the loser. Imagine if the US had tried a raid on a terrorist camp, and most of our weapons didn't work, we hit the wrong part of the camp, word of the attack leaked out in advance, and we missed most of the terrorists. The media would quickly say the raid was a failure, which "proves" that the US has lost the war. Yet when our enemy, Al Qaeda, tries an operation that fails in exactly those ways, the media says it was a success, which "proves" that the US has lost the war. This really just shows that the media and the hate-America crowd can't be trusted.
4/14/2007 05:23:00 AM
ElMondoHummus said...
"Or think that we could, by giving it victory, escape it ourselves?"
I don't think they analyze it that far, Wretchard. Rather, they operate under the assumption that the evil not named is the evil not seen, thus avoiding the invocation of terrorism as an independent phenomena, and placing blame for what aspects they choose to discuss on elements they feel they understand and can affect i.e. the West, the US. This sates the need for discussion of the topic on its own terms and instead allows them to pretend they have an understanding of the phenomena through their own conceptions of the West in general and the US in particular. They then criticize those who choose to confront the problem by charging them with bringing the evil home, or with creating more of it, thus providing the answer to the problem by 1. Circularly defining the problem as a symptom of the West/the US's actions, and 2. Placing the blame somewhere comfortable instead of somewhere logical.
How many times have you heard a critic of the US discuss Middle Eastern Radical Islamic terrorism without pitching it as a reaction to the West, rather than discuss it as a pathology of the societies from which they spring? A pathology which, if Israel or the West didn't exist, would simply be setting a different target, rather than not existing itself?
Choosing to treat terrorism as the response to Western actions, rather than the cause of them, is an act of whistling by the graveyard: It's an act of superstition, not logic, attributing to the West a level of control over other societies that it doesn't even have over its own. But it is comforting to apologists, as it does allow them the moral inversions you describe.
4/14/2007 10:00:00 AM
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