Slaughtering Forbearance and Decency

"He was as much a humanitarian as a journalist."
"He just felt that the world had to know ... the world had to know about the evil."
James Foley's father and mother

 

AP Photo/Steven Senne, File -- James Foley

"The principles that shaped Danny's work and character ... objectivity and integrity; insightful and unconventional perspective; tolerance and respect for people of all cultures; unshaken belief in the effectiveness of education and communication."
Foundation in memory of Daniel Pearl

A so-called "link analysis" from the Pearl Project shows the clues Nomani and others uncovered in their search for Danny's killers.

Islamist terrorists are wholly committed to martyrdom. This is a concept that the Iranian Revolution managed to re-instill in the faith-consciousness of Lebanese Shiites who embraced the opportunity to prove their devotion to Islam by surrendering their lives to the greater purpose of serving Islam. This is the Islam that calls upon its faithful to sacrifice that which most human beings hold most dear: existence.

Their willingness to die on behalf of advancing Islam and to celebrate that choice has spread and become a modern-day Islamic battlecry in Allahu Akbar! [God is Great!]

These sacrifices are extolled by the leaders of these fiercely fanatical Islamist jihad movements who from the comfort of their protected havens as leaders, urge young recruits to embrace their opportunity to die a celebrated shaheed whose memory will be blessed, whose family will be financially recompensed, and whose name will live on, memorialized as exalted martyrs whose exploits are taught to the young and impressionable children who will eventually take their place.

Terrorists of this stripe -- Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic State -- while claiming to love death and the opportunities it affords them to sacrifice themselves for Islam, scorn Infidels and Jews for loving life, and striving to maintain it as nature intended, endowing all living organisms with the instinct for survival of the species, collectively and singly. To struggle to combat this instinct as jihadis do, represents the culminating triumph of Islam, capable of overriding nature itself, inspiring in its followers the zeal to self-destruct.

The problem as Westerners see it is that the zeal to commit suicide in the name of a religion, is coupled with the intention of taking with them as they die, as many innocent non-Muslims as they can manage; hence the suicide bombers and their glorying in the macabre success of their suicide-murder ventures. The triumph of orchestrating a gruesome death for a journalist had its hallmark in the death of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

When the shocked world looked on twelve years ago, as he was forced to state: "My name is Daniel Pearl. I am an American Jew", personifying all that Islamist terrorists most despise and hope to destroy: the very symbol of Western Democratic advance in society, science, technology, religious tolerance, cultural progress: the combination of American and Jew. And now, after the grisly death by beheading through sawing through the neck of journalist James Foley, videoed to the world, a repeat, with a threat to the life of another American journalist Jew to follow for good measure.

"Until the morning of November 4, 1979, however, the phrase [the "Great Satan"] had remained mostly rhetorical -- a denunciation rather than a battle cry. That morning a crowd of Iranian students milled about outside the gates of the American embassy in downtown Tehran. Anger mounted in the chilly air. Very soon the crowd of chanting students, enraged over U.S. support for the dictatorial shah, turned into a surging mob. Panicked, the American sentries retreated into the embassy grounds and then into the embassy building itself when the steel gates gave way Armed with sticks and stones and a few pistols, students swarmed into the compound. Within a few hours they had created history by capturing and holding hostage an entire diplomatic corps, consisting of seventy-two people."
"Never had a Western power suffered similar humiliation. For 444 days the embassy personnel were imprisoned in their own quarters."
"'The agents of imperialism', the [Ayatollah Khomeini] told his followers, 'are busy in every corner of the Muslim world drawing our youth away from us with their evil propaganda. They are converting them into Jews and Christians; they are corrupting them, making them irreligious.' Khomeini offered images of Muslim children being turned into gamblers, prostitutes, addicts, and alcoholics because of sectarian strife and moral corruption."
"Khomeini's words and deeds encouraged militants in Lebanon, Kuwait, and Bahrain to kill and kidnap Americans and Westerners. Civil war-torn Lebanon, in particular, proved susceptible to Khomeini's anti-American foreign policy rhetoric. Following the "line of the Imam", Lebanese Shiite commandos [Hezbollah/The Party of God] perfected suicide or "martyrdom" bombings against U.S. and Israeli targets. Sheikh Mohammed Yazbek, a radical Lebanese Shiite leader, gave a speech praising the 1983 bombing of the marine compound as a "noble action because it shook America's throne. Let America, Israel, and the world know that we have a lust for martyrdom and our motto "--'Death to America' -- is being translated into reality."
Fawaz A. Gerges -- Journey Of the Jihadist