We Need a Pork Force Field or the Equivalent Thereof

Occasionally one finds an academic who is still awake and paying attention. I received this article , dated 1/21/09, in a recent email from a member of a local anti-jihad organization:

TERRORISM, SACRIFICE AND LIFE EVERLASTING UNCOMMON INSIGHTS FOR PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

by Louis Rene Beres, Purdue University

Dealing with terrorism will be at the very top of our new president’s agenda. Here it is important that he understand something odd. The core basis of Jihadist terror has little if anything to do with strategy and tactics. Rather, it is “normally” an expression of religious sacrifice.

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Here [in Jihad], sacrificial practice is a determinably sacred expression of religion. In these cultures, sacrifice derives from a desperately hoped-for conquest of personal death. Above all, with such practice, the Jihadist terrorist hopes to realize an otherwise unattainable promise of immortality.

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The Jihadist terrorist insistently claims to “love death,” but this is a lie. Paradoxically, he ecstatically kills himself and innocent others only to ensure that he will live forever. The so-called “death” that he expects to suffer in “suicide” is merely a momentary inconvenience on every martyr’s fiery path to life everlasting.

“Martyrdom” operations have always been associated with Jihad. After all, unequivocal and celebratory invocations for such killing can be found in the Koran (9:111), and, even more explicitly, in the canonical hadith.

For President Obama, the survival implications of this doctrinal fusion of religion and violence warrant very careful study. Convinced that Shahada (“Death for Allah”) violence against the United States will lead to martyrdom, the Islamist terrorist can never be deterred by ordinary threats of reprisal and retaliation. Falling outside the usual boundaries of “rationality,” Jihadist terrorism should compel us to seek very different and more purposeful measures of dissuasion. This means that to keep America safe, President Obama will have to look well beyond orthodox military and political solutions to terrorism.

It still appears to most observers that Jihadist terrorists are unafraid of death. But nothing could be further from the truth. It is precisely their unique and overwhelming terror of death that leads these killers to “suicide.” Ironically, because dying in the act of killing “infidels” and “apostates” is presumed to buy freedom from the penalty of death, these terrorists aim to conquer mortality by “killing themselves.”

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America and its terrorist enemies have decidedly different orientations to "peace." This stark asymmetry puts the United States at a foreseeable disadvantage. While America’s enemies manifest their "positive" expectations for immortality, individual and collective, by the intended and doctrinal slaughter of “heathen,” our leaders have thus far remained blithely unaware of these enemies’ murderous decisional calculus.

America’s new president now faces a real and expanding threat of unconventional war and unconventional terrorism. Faced with adversaries who are not only willing to die, but who also seek their own "deaths" - because this sacrificial death is presumed to yield personal immortality - Mr. Obama should quickly understand the critical limits of ordinary warfare, national homeland defense and deterrence.

The danger to America lies at two discrete but interrelated levels. First, it exists at the level of the individual Jihadist enemy who chooses “martyrdom” through a path of terrorism. Second, it exists at the level of states, the individual “self-sacrificers” in macrocosm, which may someday soon choose collective self-sacrifice through their frenzied initiation of chemical, biological or nuclear war against the United States. Significantly such a war might not be fought for traditional military purposes, but for "liquidation” of “infidels.” To be sure, any such choice would represent the unholiest of marriages between aggressive war and genocide, two clearly codified crimes under international law.

The root problem here is Jihadist death fear and the consequent compulsion to sacrifice certain despised "others." This compulsion, in turn, stems from a widespread and doctrinal belief that killing unbelievers, and also being killed by unbelievers, is the path toward immortality. Terrorist unwillingness to accept personal death leads, then, to the killing of others to escape this death. The ironies are staggering, but the connections persist. For President Barack Obama, they must be examined immediately and with great care.

How can Obama, with his childhood Muslim background, not be aware of this on some level? Is it possible he believes he can deflect this Jihad compulsion by "reconciliation"? Or is he more likely to pursue a strategy based on steeping America in Islamic influence and gradually turning up the heat? Will we eventually find ourselves facing a nationwide "convert or die" threat? Will this be part of the cleansing of our "souls" that Michelle Obama was yammering about in the early part of the campaign?