21-Nov-07: On the true, base, really ultimate root causes of terror

Terrorism is like cancer. There's no point in arguing with it, or trying to understand it. You have to defeat it because otherwise it will defeat you and me. Jihadist terrorism in particular has a global agenda and no one is safe.

We're fed up with people doing moral gymnastics to explain and understand and really, really try to figure out what drives the terrorists, the jihadists.

Time and again, otherwise intelligent, well-educated people resort - in trying to reach that elusive understanding - to shallow rationalizations.

For instance, that the terrorists act out of desperation ("Suicide Bombing: Desperate Tactic" - BBC). Or the demented 'replacement' theology of the Palestinian Arab Sabeel organization that asserts "the phenomenon of suicide bombings... tragically arises from the deep misery and torment of many Palestinians. For how else can one explain it?"

One can explain it in an entirely different way without even touching on misery or torment by showing how the adherents of a particular form of a certain great religion have taken hatred - one of the most powerful human mindsets - and used it as the fuel for something unimaginably sick and dangerous. None of their faithful came into the world with that sort of hatred roiling within them. It was planted inside them over years of indoctrination and persuasion via a process involving millions of religious, political, community and educational leaders.

For those root-causers out there, here's a report from Pakistan via today's edition of The Australian:

...Horrifying new details emerged last night of the attempt by suicide bombers to kill Ms Bhutto on her return home from exile last month. Investigators from Ms Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party said yesterday they believed the bomb, which killed 170 people and left hundreds more wounded, was strapped to a one-year-old child carried by its jihadist father. They said the suicide bomber tried repeatedly to carry the baby to Ms Bhutto's vehicle as she drove in a late-night cavalcade through the streets of Karachi. "At the point where the bombs exploded, Benazir Bhutto herself saw the man with the child and asked him to come closer so that she could hug or kiss the infant," investigators were reported as saying. "But someone came in between and a guard felt that the man with the child was not behaving normally. So the child was not allowed to come aboard Benazir's vehicle." Ms Bhutto is said to have told investigators she recalls the face of the man who was carrying the infant. She has asked to see recordings made by television news channels to try to identify the man.

A political settling of accounts, and the bomb is strapped to the body of some jihadist lunatic's one-year-old child. If you had to invent a proof that hate-based madness has hijacked them and their religion, you couldn't come up with anything more appalling than this.

It's cancer. Stop arguing, stop understanding. Start cutting.