Islamophobia

Okay, um, so I was reading Mark Steyn a while back, and if I thought I could get away with it, I'd say this line was my own: "Marx has a lot more blood on his hands than Christ -- other people’s blood, I mean." He's who I want to be when I grow up. Mark, not Marx.

Okay. Uh, so I also thought of something funny. So here’s the definition of islamophobia that I thought up a while back. It’s really good. Okay, so here it is: islamophobia – Islam's fear of anything non-Islamic. See what I did there? Good, isn’t it. And it gets even better, because I also though of this too: islamyphobia – My nonexistent fear of anything Islamic. See what I did? Get it? I changed the o to a y, making it my, like in it belongs to me. Get it? Man, that’s funny. I'm very funny.

And you know what? I figured something out, a while back.

Terrorists don't love their children.

I don’t mean Moslems – I expect they’re as human as we are. But terrorists, of any ilk, sacrifice anything and everything for that one single cause. We love many things – liberty, family, God, ice cream, pornography, bill clinton, etc. To be a terrorist however requires such an absolute degree of fanaticism that there is nothing that won’t be sacrificed for the cause. Witness "Um Nidal," the Medea of Palestine. Off she sends her young sons to explode on some random Jews, and I don't mean in a pornographic or clinton way. I mean in a gore way. I can see sending my son to war. I don't see myself sending him to deliberate death for an abstract notion supposedly achieved by randomly targeting non-combatants.

As with so many things, bin Laden is right when he sums up his belief. They love death more than the lives of their children. We love our children more than we love life. They will sacrifice their children for their cause. We will sacrifice oursleves for our children. They fight not to make the future better, but to kill the enemy. We fight that our children may have a better life than we have.

To so suppress the natural affections for an abstract theory is no new thing. Marxism and its derivatives are clear examples. Any revolutionary idea, I suppose, might demand this sort of squashing of the natural for the ideal. Even Jesus said there is a reward in leaving, for His sake, mother and father and wife and children (Mk 10:29). That is a hard teaching. But it is not a teaching to murder.

In such distinctions we find truth. Every organized system of thought is a philosophy. Marxism and Nazism and islamism and Christianity – all are religions, that tell us the meaning of life and the destiny of humanity. They all require sacrifices. But only the evil ones require the death of unbelievers. Christians are told to hang their own bodies on the cross. Nazis build ovens to burn their victims. Communists starve whole provinces to death. Islamists attack women and children and expect to go to heaven for it. There may be some cause that is worth committing such crimes. There is no religion that’s worth it.



J