To: LindyBill who wrote (55225 ) 7/20/2004 11:06:14 AM From: carranza2 Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 793917 We were attacked three years ago, without warning or predicate event. The attack was not a gesture of heroic resistance nor the offshoot of some bright utopian resolve, but the very flower of a movement that delights in the potential for martyrdom expressed in the squalls of the newly born. It is a movement that is about death—that honors death, that loves death, that fetishizes death, that worships death, that seeks to accomplish death wherever it can, on a scale both intimate and global—and if it does not warrant the expenditure of what the self-important have taken to calling “blood and treasure,” then what does? Slavery? Fascism? Genocide? Let’s not flatter ourselves. If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil—and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it—then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all, and our democracy is not only diminished, it dissolves into the meaninglessness of privilege. I'm going to buy the issue of Esquire in which this quote from Tom Junod appears. <rant>It made me think that the Islamicist death fetish is fundamentally wrong not only for all the obvious moral reasons but because it is contrary to life's drive to evolve, thrive, and survive. Everything about the Life Force is geared to continual improvement in all ways, from aesthetics to function. The primordial slime gave way to things such as orchids and creatures which can only be said to be amazing in their complexity and beauty. The Islamist death fetish negates the Life Force. Why should it be allowed to thrive and survive?</rant>