The conviction in Pakistan of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the
mastermind in the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter
Daniel Pearl, is likely to trigger waves of violent protests from
Islamists throughout the nation. “We’ll see who will die first, me
or the authorities who have arranged the death sentence for me,”
Sheikh Omar said through his lawyer. The threat is real enough that
the American Embassy in Islamabad is now operating on a “heightened
state of security readiness.”
In anticipation of the verdict, and after weeks of literal and
figurative queasiness, I recently downloaded the video clip of
Pearl’s execution that’s been floating around the Web for months.
It opens with Pearl, unshaven and haggard, identifying himself as
an American and a Jew; he talks about his family’s Jewish heritage
and then segues into transparently coerced denunciations of
American foreign policy. Interspersed throughout Pearl’s monologue
are fleeting images of dead and wounded Muslims. The tape then jump
cuts, for perhaps three seconds, to the decapitation of Pearl’s
corpse; his face is clean shaven at the end; he has been
meticulously prepared for slaughter. This is followed by a
lingering shot of Pearl’s head held aloft, a warning to the rest of
us of what happens to infidels, but also a prize — the spoils of
jihad. The video is credited to something called the National
Movement for the Restoration of Pakistan Sovereignty.
It’s a sign of the relative civility of the Judeo-Christian
West, and the relative barbarity of the Islamic East, that our
leaders have sought to suppress the footage for fear that it might
inflame passions against ordinary Muslims … whereas it’s being
utilized by the Islamists themselves to recruit ordinary Muslims as
future terrorists.
Still, the tape should be broadcast here for two
reasons. First, it serves as a quick and eloquent rejoinder to the
Edward Saids of the world who inform us that we must look to the
root causes of terrorism; Said, for his part, prefers to set the
term within ironic quotation marks, as in “terrorism,” referring to
it recently as “a panacea of a word that takes no account of
history, context, society or anything else.” But what “history,”
“context” or “society” accounts for the celebratory beheading a
journalist? What is the sequence of causes that produces not just a
cold-blooded execution, and not just the cold-blooded execution of
a non-combatant, but the torture and decapitation of a
non-combatant, followed by the ritualized trophy-taking of his
head? How far backwards in time must we travel to make sense of it,
to find an equivalent commingling of formality and bloodlust? The
Mongols under Genghis Khan? The Huns under Attila? Rome under
Caligula?
Not only should the Pearl video be broadcast, it should be rerun
again and again, spliced together with like material into a kind of
luna-CSPAN of radical Islam’s greatest hits: First the Pearl
decapitation, followed by the clip of Palestinian thugs bathing
their hands in a dead Israeli’s blood and waving them to a cheering
mob, then footage of Muslim women passing out candies to celebrate
the September 11th attacks on American civilians, next a dozen or
so interviews with fathers and mothers of suicide bombers who
declare their satisfaction and pride in their children’s massacre
of Israeli children, and then, for a finale, the money-shot of
Muslim toddlers dolled up by their doting parents in mock-explosive
vests and trotted out for anti-West rallies. Afterwards, perhaps,
at the end of the loop, there would be time for a brief lecture by
Edward Said … just to provide “context.”
The second reason the Pearl video should be broadcast is that it
might begin the process of steeling ourselves for what’s to come.
There is a natural queasiness about the reality of the war in which
we’re now engaged. We continue to pray, as we should, for an
outbreak of mass sanity in the Islamic world. Right now, however,
Muslim kingdoms are basket cases — maniacal legions of Jeffrey
Dahmers, Lizzie Bordens and Colin Fergusons circulating unhindered
among vast multitudes of cynical enablers and fellow travelers,
presided over, in the most benign cases, by an Al Capone, in the
most malignant cases, by a Charles Manson. If only the lot of them
would come to their senses, we tell ourselves, they’d realize that
we mean them no harm. They’d realize that if we meant them harm,
we’d already have unleashed violence of biblical proportions.
They’d realize that the low-tech incinerations of Berlin and Tokyo,
circa 1945, would have translated into high-tech incinerations of
Baghdad and Tehran, circa 2001. If we meant them harm, they’d be
too busy sifting rubble, burying dead and drinking urine to burn
American flags.
It’s still possible, though extremely unlikely, that sanity
will prevail in the Islamic world, and that the war on
terror will end with universal assent to the rule of law and a
moment of unprecedented cooperation among nations. That’s the
hopeful scenario. The alternative scenario, however, the
only alternative scenario, and the far likelier scenario,
is the one we must begin gearing up for — not just militarily but
psychically. If the war on terror does not end with a sudden
outbreak of Muslim sanity, then it will surely end over the dead
bodies of hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of Muslim
civilians.
That the only two alternatives are Muslims coming to their
senses or Muslims dying in grotesque numbers is horrible to admit,
but it is certain — in much the same way it was certain for
Germans in the 1930s. Islamism is, to be sure, no less evil than
Nazism, though the fact that the Islamic world has spent the last
500 years riding the technological caboose of humanity ensures that
the radicals’ genocidal ambitions are being pursued with
blundering, ham-fisted gestures rather than the with the ruthless
efficiency of the Nazi death camps. Still, the parallel is
instructive, for even as ordinary Germans were ultimately culpable
for the crimes perpetrated in their midst by the Nazis, so too
ordinary Muslims are now ultimately culpable for the crimes of the
Islamists. Yet the Islamists are, if anything, even nuttier than
their Nazi counterparts because at least the Germans had a fighting
chance; by contrast, the Islamists, and their Muslim sympathizers,
are staring down an opposing force whose lone military weakness is
its moral revulsion at killing promiscuously, even when provoked,
to be rid of its enemies. But that revulsion is sure to wane in
direct proportion to acts of terror. In other words, the greater
the success of the Islamic terrorists, the closer nigh draws their
own, and their sympathizers’, doom.
But why would such indiscriminate carnage ever become necessary?
First, because sooner or later the terrorists’ efforts
will bear fruit; we will eventually take another
massive hit on the scale of September 11th, or else dozens of minor
hits on the model of the Palestinian intifada, and the
inevitable outcry for our own security at whatever cost will become
deafening. Second, because a measured response will only guarantee
another round of violence. Third, because even our smartest bombs
are not smart enough to conduct man-on-the-street interviews before
blowing the street to smithereens. And fourth, and perhaps most
critically, because wars do not truly end until the defeated people
understand that they’ve been defeated. This was the tragic lesson
of World War One; the fact that ordinary Germans did not feel like
losers precipitated their embrace of Nazism … and, in the end,
a much deadlier Second World War. Even now, as New York
Times columnist Thomas Friedman has written, “The notion is
taking hold [in the Islamic world] that with a combination of
demographics (a baby boom) and terrorism, the Arabs can actually
destroy Israel. Some radicals even fantasize that they can
undermine America.”
That fantasy must be annihilated.
No, I’m not talking about a nuclear strike. Conventional weapons
will suffice. What I am talking about however — and God
forgive me for even writing this — is the prospect dropping very
dumb bombs from very high altitudes, and lobbing very big missiles
from very long distances, into known terrorist locations … even
if they happen to lie within civilian population centers. What I am
talking about is a response that is both disproportionate and
unspeakably awful, a response that targets our enemies even at the
expense of their sympathizers, a response that sends an unambiguous
message: If you allow maniacs to do their maniacal work among
you, here is your fate.
Will such a response engender even more hatred for America in
the Islamic world? Yes, but in the final analysis it doesn’t matter
whether our enemies hate us — as long as they soil themselves at
the thought of kindling our wrath. Will such a response serve to
gratify the base desire for revenge? Yes, but crushing a lunatic
threat to liberty and equality is not a consummation devoutly to be
wished; it is, rather, a categorical imperative remorsefully to be
discharged. Will such a response reduce us to the level of our
enemies? Not quite, but it will be a step backward in the
moral evolution of the human race. Evolution proceeds in fits and
starts, however, and it seems more likely than ever that an
occasional step back is required in order to move forward.
Still, for the time being at least, we can continue to pray. But
we’d better pray hard and fast. For the soul of Daniel Pearl. And
for the souls of the thousands of victims of Islamic terrorism.
And, while we’re at it, for sanity among Muslims. And for their
souls, and ours, if it does not come.
