Robert Spencer is a well known Islamic scholar. And that, he might be thinking, gives him the right to write anything about his subject. His recent article at The Front Page Magazine sets out to show how the Muslims kill each other. No one is denying that but the trick lies in not saying anything about how other believers from other faiths kill each other; for example, how the Christians have butchered themselves throughout history. This is indeed the colonial project at work.
Palestinian - Arab commentators like the late Edward and the still writing Prof. Irfan Habib have pointed out exactly this bias by Western Islamic scholars while they write on the Middle East and if Spencer and his ilk think that lambasting Muslims will stop terrorism, he is utterly wrong.
The Protestants and the Catholics have been longing each others throats in Ireland and even in the US, at least in its early settler-history. Then there is the monumental sin of White Christians torturing spiritually, psychologically, sexually and physically their black brethren.
The various evangelical movements now literary plague mainstream Christianity and often at the field-level, lead to inter-denominational violence. So, it is not at all right to speak of Islamic violence in isolation. Rather we must speak of violence; the impulse to kill others and the wicked designs of them who murder and create mayhem.
Islamic Jehadis are not very different from the left-guerillas who are willing to kill for say, the Basque territory in Spain or the poor Naxalites who operate in hinterland India or even the chilling fictional children in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. They all desire to kill their own and distort anything that may prevent them from killing.
It is known that perpetrators of violence feel an orgasmic pleasure after their gruesome acts. The violent of this world too have interpreted every write in every Holy Book with impunity, and Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists are no exceptions. Let us remember the Salem witch trials and shudder how good, peace-loving Christians put other innocent Christians to the stake. So, when these Jehadis interpret the Quran for their own purposes as allowing them to murder less strict Muslims, they are just paving their shortcuts to hell.
Intellectually inferior and emotionally unsure men can hardly ever hold their own in front of civilized human beings. They have to have a quick fix to show the world how great and powerful they are. Just kill the opposition - the easiest solution of them all. This is not unique to Islam but is found everywhere. See what is happening to Burma; what happened to the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.
The best way to asses terrorists or Jehadis is to compare them with serial killers. The latter kill for some perverted joy, terrorists kill for some cause, which is there license to murder. George Bernard Shaw had once remarked that the last refuge of the bad is patriotism and the psychoanalyst Freud had pointed out that some people need causes and objects other than what we associate with sexual excitement to make them happy. Jehadis, terrorists and other perverts are men and women who need an apparently higher cause to make them happy.
Also, let us not forget how most fundamentalists hate what they most desire, women. From the Inquisition to the Taliban, all violent men hate women. They do not really hate women but fear their own success in making others happy. So why not espouse a cause and pretend that you hate what you most covet. That’s all that needs to be said of that lot.
VIA: Frontpage
Image: ASIA NEWS.
