After Beslan, the search was on. Where could a euphemism be found? Were the killers best described as militants? Or would it be better to describe them as commandos? Perhaps activist would be a superior term. Anything but terrorist.
You see, to call the separatists, the rebels, the extremists, to call them terrorists would be to take sides. It would be to make a judgment. And we can’t do that, can we?
Here is the reason why we can’t - we think they are like us. We can’t imagine that anyone would do anything as horrible, as depraved, as cutting off someone’s head, filming the act and selling the video in the local market, unless they were truly desperate. But who made them desperate? Ah yes, us. So it was, in the end, all our fault.
The thing is, that the more we think it is our fault the greater the brutality the terrorists are tempted to engage in, the harder they work to illustrate their “desperation”. If blowing up adults doesn’t make them seem desperate, then try children, if shooting doesn’t capture headlines, try beheading. If they can do something truly repulsive, then we will search ever harder to see what we can do to help them calm down, we will move that little bit quicker to assuage their fury.
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How do we fight back? By understanding that they are not like us. A combination of a warped ideology and a warped personality produces terrorist violence. Desperation has nothing to do with it and the brutality cannot be assuaged, only beaten. They have become sick with an addiction to violence, with the pornography of terror.
The terrorists also claim that they love death while we love life, not the boast of normal people. I sometimes wonder if this is really true. The reaction of Hamas to the assassination of their leaders suggests that it might not be. But really this doesn’t matter. Whether or not it is true need not detain us. Even if they love death, we may still need to kill them, and the fact that we love life must not deter us from risking life to protect ourselves and our way of living.