The Last Martyr

 One man's heaven is another man's hell
One man's buy is another man's sell
One man's day is another man's night
One man's peace is another one's fight 
--Two Sides to Every Story,
Joe Walsh  

She could never be a saint,
but she thought she could be a martyr
if they killed her quick 
--Flannery O'Connor

And it repented the Lord
that he had made man on the earth,
and it grieved him at his heart
--Genesis 6:6
________________________

A Clarification on the previous post, You're All In or You're Not:


While death, killing and dying are central issues in both Islam and Christianity (and Clint Eastwood movies and lots of other things) religions accord their own values to them. This is my view on the differences between the current two players, and why this is essential to their play of war.

Before proceeding, yes, this a military blog and most interest surrounds the "wars" qua war; the Phoney Wars on Terror (PWOT ©), in particular. But since tanks are driven and mortars lobbed by men, it seems fair to go to the human ground when considering war, despite the Department of Defense types who see the whole thing within the confines of their operational maps

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but whereas the United States has a secular Army composed of members hewing to a variety or religious beliefs or none at all, the Islamic State (IS) fighters are one thing: Sunni Muslims. (This is not a logical fallacy. I am not stating all Muslims are IS sympathizers, but simply all IS members are Muslims. ) When they complete a mission, they are always reported as hailing their god, "Allahu Akhbar!"

For those who wish to displace religion from its foundational position motivating most of the Islamic attacks in the past 35+ years, I would suggest that is a mistake. My position is to neither denigrate nor praise any particular religion, only to recognize a foundational belief driving today's hostilities.

Christianity worships a meek prophet, Jesus, who according to the dogma martyred himself so that others may live (John 10:10). Looking at the the Eucharist, what could it mean when Jesus insists that his followers will actually be eating his flesh and blood when they partake of the ritual?

One understanding might be that, beginning from the premise that man is fallen and therefore all are killers and betrayers and every other bad thing that humans are capable of, through the grisly Eucharist man is made to re-enact his responsibility for his murderous impulse each time.

The believer must face his failures in a very real way, by ingesting Him and therefore integrating His faultlessness into his being, perhaps analogous to a pluripotent stem cell injection. Ergo, every Eucharist is the drama of death and Resurrection, writ small (the Resurrection being the continuance of the life in the believer who has partaken of the meal.) Whether that is a precise analysis of His intention (who can know?) one point is clear: Jesus intends to be the last and ultimate martyr.

He will redeem man so that he need not continue carrying out his petty part (though it hasn't quite worked out that way.) Despite man's continued bad behavior, Jesus's death is memorialized at most services. No more sacrificial lambs, no more Crucifixion, no more martyrdom.

Jesus is known as the "Prince of Peace" and the "Lamb of God". This stands diametrically opposite to the warrior Mohammed, who does not preach love of one's brother. In fact, this is a tightly fraternal religion and its members are charged with killing the infidel, who in fact, may just be a member of another sect of Islam (Shi'ia).

To say this interpretation of Sharia is extremism is like calling the Catholic, who believes he is consuming the body and blood of Christ, misbegotten. In fact, they are both faithful adherents.

Followers of Christianity may not have gotten the brotherhood message correct for several centuries, and gross numbers committed grave crimes under cover of their God. Many still do not understand the message of the religion they would claim. But the message is naught but love, and especially, love the stranger.

However, for the Muslims warring today, for those who fight behind the aegis of their prophet Mohammed, they are not misunderstand their doctrine, they are fulfilling it. It is not for them the self-immolation of the Hindu or the Buddhist. There are no Gandhis.

Maybe someone should have done a cultural study prior to invasion and occupation. Some liberals might have stopped insisting what a peaceful religion Islam is.

Of course, it can be expected that anyone will fight against the colonizer, as the French and later the Americans saw in Vietnam. But in Iraq, we were two-down, for not only were we the unwelcome invaders, but the people had been seething at least since they were thrown together into that great confabulation called Iraq last century. We simply unleashed the controls on all of that anger.

Time to say, "We can't do this anymore. We are aiding and abetting the violence by our very presence. Sorry, gotta go." Yes, it's shabby, but who hasn't the U.S. betrayed at one time or another? That's realpolitik, baby.

Or we can continue with the showdown at the Apocalypto Corral, and give the talking heads more daily predictable fodder. And give you something predictable to view when you flip on the news, and a sound byte for when you want to have a little banter with business partners on world matters.

I write on a military blog, and I'm getting bored with this.

Are you getting bored?

You're All In or You're Not

 --Ceci n'est pas une pomme 
  (This is not an apple), 
Rene Magritte   

According to The Oxford English Dictionary, 
the word "snapshot" was originally a hunting term 
 --One Hour Photo (2002)

Can we film the operation?
Is the head dead yet?
You know the boys in the newsroom
got a running bet 
--Dirty Laundry, Don Henley 

--It’s strange that we’ve never
 read of this in the newspapers

--Well… that’s newspapers for you, ma’am.
You could fill volumes with
what you don’t read in them 
--The Green Berets (1968)
 ___________________

Subtitle: This is not a Muslim. 

"The Islamic State is not really Islamic" -- perhaps one of President Obama's most disingenuous recent statements. Perhaps they remind him more of Urantians?

Now that's like saying a Dodge Ram pickup is really a Toyota, or a cherry cheesecake is actually a rhubarb pie. Is it blasphemy, a lie, or a massive denial? Perhaps cognitive dissonance of the highest level, or just the canniness of a politician seeking to curry favor with the less animated members of that one-billion strong religion?

Of course it is Islamic, as Islamic as Islamic can get. It's just that most Muslims practice a form of Muslim Lite, like cafeteria Catholics who haven't the stomach for transubstantiation, a doctrine which explains the transformation of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Jesus.

Religions in general serve as primers on how to live a good life, and they are founded by crusaders with an agenda, some more benign and ecumenical than others, their words often warped by their inheritors. They basically tend to man's basic needs and they all have their quirks, but if you're a believer you cleave to The Word, regardless of those seeming hiccups.

For the Catholic, The Word is that you are eating His flesh and drinking His blood in the rite of the Eucharist. It is cannibalism, but by invitation (sort of like the Germans in the recent press who had placed classified adverts requesting to be eaten, like a nice sushi.) Christopher Hitchens deconstructed the idea of belief completely. The dogma is clear and if you reject any of it, you are a hypocrite at best. But hey, religion (and the world) is full of them.

Likewise, if one is a true believer in the prophet Mohammed, one believes that infidels (= those of other religions) should be killed. It is all there, in their Good Book, the Koran. It's not a very happy (for non-Muslims) or modern concept, but for those feeling nostalgic or who have never entered modernity, it is spot-on and clear as day.

Just as the Christian crusaders fought both for belief and booty, so too the thoroughly modern Muslim crusader. To have a caliphate of your own is a pretty fine thing, after all.

Our misbegotten wars have served to animate vast swaths of often unemployed usually young people disenfranchised in their own countries, subjected to the brutalities and insults of an invading and occupying Army. Some people come to God when their back is against the wall -- it is the last comfort of and the last depot for the desperate.

These desperadoes are finding common ground with the True Believers (always a much smaller minority.) They yearn to live in their own "ownership society" (as President George W. Bush encouraged us to do) and regain a state of grace and dignity (regardless of how undignified their methods might appear to us.)

And being salacious Westerners in bondage to easy and gory visuals we give them incessant free press, providing them with the most valuable asset they possess: the ability to spread fear beyond the discrete beheading or other vulgar murder. We are aiding and abetting the criminal/terrorist, wittingly or not. Do we acknowledge our role in the crimes we behold?

We are like Yuri Bezmenov's demoralized useful idiots. But to what end?

Waging jihad is every bit as faithful to doctrine as the flesh and blood consumption of the believing Catholic. What right have we to dismiss or deny the validity of these doctrinal beliefs to the adherent? But to deny these realities is not to do justice to the facts.

If indeed the slashers and hackers and beheaders are the rare breed, why are we proliferating their self-aggrandizing videos? Shouldn't the goal be to minimize that message while elevating anything opposed to it?

Have I missed anything?

Running Down a Dream

If I listened long enough to you
I’d find a way to believe that it’s all true
--Reason to Believe, Tim Harden
__________________

Faisal Shahzad, the New York Times Square bombing ace (not) was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday for being a total failure as a Jihadist bomber (Times Square bomber sentenced, warns of more Attacks.)

His scare comments are not worthy of comment ("Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun. Consider me the first droplet of the blood that will follow"), for if he is the first impotent droplet of blood, we haven't much to fear. His training and operation skills were in the minus figures, and he is a joke, were anyone in the laughing mood.

However, it is U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum's comments that deserve censure.

Cederbaum gave a Judge Judy performance, saying "I do hope you will spend some of the time in prison thinking carefully about whether the Quran wants you to kill lots of people." Her directive was totally inappropriate in a legal setting.

Cederbaum's moral directive plays right into the Jihadist propagandists. Shahzad was not on trial for a faulty interpretation of the Koran, but rather for attempting to set off a bomb in Times Square -- a criminal act. The judge's comment is straight from the Hollywood playbook, and confirms to the world that the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) and the US Judicial system is engaged in religious warfare and persecution of Islamist beliefs.

Cederbaum's statement shoved Judeo-Christian values down the defendant's throat and it will come back to haunt us somewhere down the line. It was unnecessary inflammatory rhetoric. The US judicial system works quite well sans the intrusion of religious edicts. We fail when we forget our most basic tenets.

The real war is over nothing less than the survival of our precious democratic values. When we lose those, THEY have won.


. . . to be continued