Wednesday - April 18, 2007

Murderers Row

What do serial killers and terrorists have in common? Good question. There is a lot of truth in the answer given by Robert Tracinski below. Essentially, there is no difference other than motive and scale. There are madmen all around us. The only thing I would add to the editorial below is: why then do we have a Congress that wants to turn our backs on the terrorists and walk away, hoping they will leave us alone ,and why do we have such a lax judicial system that effectively does the same when murderers are given light sentences and released in the hope they will leave us alone?

“The Killers Creed”
-by Robert Tracinski (The Intellectual Activist)

The irony of the Virginia Tech case is that it is distractinng our attention from the War on Terrorism, when it ought to be drawing our attention to that wider issue, because of the basic similarity of a spree shooter and a terrorist.

This may be why, of all the nations whose press has covered this case, the English-speaking Israeli press seems to have paid the least attention. A disgruntled individual decides that the world has been unjust to him, and he seeks to redeem his sense of failure and “humiliation” by engaging in a killing spree that ends in his own death—none of that is news to the Israelis. They have faced this sort of thing constantly, for years, from alienated Palestinian youth.

But the Palestinian spree killers are different—and that difference is what makes them far more dangerous. For years, whenever one of these mass shooting makes it into the news, Jack Wakeland has described the killer to me as a terrorist without a cause—a terrorist who uses random violence to protest the narrow fact that his girlfriend dumped him or that he has a dead-end job, the narrow fact of his own failure in life. (The Virginia Tech killer apparently left a “manifesto” with a “somewhat incoherent list of grievances.")

These spree killers have the mentality of a terrorist—but without a wider political cause to give their criminal schemes a sense of moral or religious legitimacy. But what about those who do have a justification—a whole religious, moral, and political theory—that make their lust to kill into more than just a personal fury?

What of those who have a theory that makes killing into a holy war—a jihad—which, in turn, allows them to recruit followers and start an organized movement with many sympathizers in the general population?

That is precisely what we face in the War on Terrorism: the mentality of the serial killer as a religious and political system that threatens us with mass death on a scale far greater than any disgruntled loner with a handgun could ever dream of. If you don’t believe me, check out the extraordinary report below, which I briefly referenced in yesterday’s TIA Daily, but which deserves more examination in light of yesterday’s events.

This report reinforces what September 11 has already taught us: that we are up against an ideology that justifies murder in the name of religion and threatens to generate and unleash upon us whole squadrons of serial killers. Worse, we face the possibility of the ultimate spree killer: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, armed not with a pair of pistols, but with nuclear-armed missiles.

“Report: Serial Killers Cleared by Iranian Supreme Court as Victims’ Activities Were Un-Islamic,” FoxNews.com, April 15

The Iranian Supreme Court has vacated the murder convictions of a group of serial killers because their victims were engaging in un-Islamic activities, the British Broadcasting Corp. reports.

The men were convicted for a series of grisly killings in the southeastern city of Kerman in 2002. The vigilantes were said to believe that Islam condoned the killing of anyone engaged in illicit activities if they issued two warnings to the victims, the BBC reports.

At least 18 people were killed on the murder spree, but the men were only tried for five of the deaths. Some of the victims were stoned, others were suffocated, and at least one man was buried alive, according to the vigilantes’ confessions. These men told the court that their understanding of the teachings of one Islamic cleric allowed them to kill immoral people if they had ignored two warnings to stop their bad behavior, according to the BBC.

For more from Mr. Tracinski subscribe to TIA Daily

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/18/2007 at 09:12 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime • Terrorists •  
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