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Nothing Islamic about human sacrifice
By Ralph Peters
courtesy: USAToday.Com (Posted 11/16/2004)
Suicide bombings. Assassinations. The wholesale murder
of prisoners. The mass slaughter of 9/11. Videotaped
be-headings and the execution studios recently
discovered in Fallujah. We describe it as "Islamic
terrorism."
And we're wrong.
The hard-core terrorists spawned by the breakdown of the
Middle East quote the Koran. They wear Muslim garments.
They perform the daily rituals prescribed by the faith
into which they were born. But all of us, in the West
and the Middle East, have mistaken the identity of these
butchers.
For all of their Muslim trappings, the terrorists of
al-Qaeda and its affiliates have returned to pre-Islamic
practices, to behaviors that Moses, Christ and Mohammed
uniformly rejected: They practice human sacrifice.
The grisly decapitations caught on film and the
explosives-laden cars driven into crowds, the bombings
of schools and the execution of kidnapped women are not
sanctioned by a single passage in the Koran. Nor are
they political acts committed by freedom fighters. These
are the actions of a resurrected blood cult that has
nothing to do with the message of the Pro phet Mohammed
and everything to do with the bloodthirsty winged devils
and gory altars that haunted the ancient Middle East.
The terrorists may believe that they're good Muslims —
self-awareness is not a widespread human trait — but
their deeds are those of the pagans Mohammed condemned.
We live in an age of change so profound that entire
cultures cannot cope with the stress. In the Middle
East, we see more than the routine "clash of
civilizations." Instead, we are eyewitnesses to an event
without precedent: the crash of the once-great,
still-proud civilization of Middle Eastern Islam.
In the Middle East, the heavens are falling, and the
Earth is wracked by failure. The result was predictable,
had we been willing to open our eyes. From the confusion
of Reformation-era Europe to China suffering the advent
of Western gunboats, history saw human beings react to
cultural crises by fleeing into cults that sought
revenge.
Instead of returning to a "pure" Islam, the terrorists
are building a blood cult, a deformed offshoot of their
faith that revives the most primitive and grotesque of
religious practices. Human sacrifice pervaded early
societies, from pre-Columbian America through Europe and
across Asia. Yet we have grown so accustomed to gentler
forms of religion that the discovery of a ritually
murdered corpse in alpine ice shocks20us. When bones
unearthed in the American Southwest bear the markings of
ceremonial murder and cannibalism, the politically
correct shout their denials. But the truth is that our
ancestors bribed their gods with blood.
A paradox of this era of technological wonders is that
its dislocations have conjured primitive impulses from
the past. This is the great age of both satellites and
revived superstition, of all-seeing sensors and blind
faith.
Every one of the great religions is under siege. But the
crisis is nowhere as intense as in the Middle East,
where treasured values and inherited behaviors simply do
not work in the 21st century.
Nor is the cult of human sacrifice unique to "Islamic"
terrorists even now. What was Jonestown but the murder
of hundreds of humans in service to a warped religious
vision? From spaceship cults in California to the
killing of "witches" in the developing world, the
impulse to please one god or another by spilling blood
remains more deeply ingrained than we like to admit.
"Experts" schooled in the failed dogmas of the past
century say Osama bin Laden and his ilk are political
actors driven to violence, that the religious trappings
of terror are only superficial. They're utterly wrong.
The terrorists' relationship to their god is
fundamental.
It's time to put aside the international-relations texts
that have failed the world so miserably. We must
confront the elementary problem of our times: Frightened
human beings and the longing for easy answers that lead
to the most repugnant forms of faith.
The Aztecs are back.
You don't need to understand Arabic to get the message
of those videotaped beheadings, with their rituals and
liturgy. The sermon precedes the sacrifice. Then the
human calf, shivering with terror, has his throat slit
by the "priest." We might be watching a ceremony from
4,000 years ago.
The attack on 9/11 was not a political act. It was a
religious act. But it wasn't Islamic. The Koran forbids
the murder of innocents (as well as the taking of
hostages and the abuse of prisoners). The 9/11 attacks
were cult behavior from the dawn of civilization,
employing modern tools.
We must cut through the layers of intellectual nonsense
piled up by academics and pundits to get at the essence
of this new — and very old — reality. When the
terrorists we face invoke the names of "Allah" or
"Mohammed," they are blaspheming and corrupting a great
faith. The prophet was appalled by the religious
practices of the early desert peoples. Those who murder
in his name today have rejected his message even as they
claim to revere it.
The terrorists we face aren't super-Muslims. They're
Islam's worst enemies. They don't seek to turn back the
calendar to the 10th century. They're reaching back to
the sordid epochs when gods drank human blood.
Ralph Peters is a retired military officer and the
author of
Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World. He is a
member of USA TODAY's board of contributors. |
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