Religious extremism and international legal norms: perfidy, preemption, and irrationality.

• Author: Beres, Louis Rene
• Position: Sacred Violence: Religion and Terrorism

The French dramatist and diplomat, Jean Giraudoux, inquires in Sodome et Gomorrhe, "C'est beau, n "est-ce pas, la fin du monde?" (1) "It is beautiful, isn't it, the end of the world?"

Like the ironic playwright who explodes the myth of an ordered cosmos, the contemporary terrorist often sees great beauty in the ultimate form of disorder, in chaotic visions of an apocalyptic end to "heresy," "blasphemy," "apostasy," and all other forms of unbelief. For the terrorist who remains defined in many different ways by the diverse worlds of law and politics, violence is not only a sacred path to universal cleansing and redemption, it is the only path. What is more, this "path"--to continue the metaphor--is more than a means to an end. It is in essence the end, an end unto itself. (2)

For the individual terrorist--and today we really mean the Jihadist terrorist--violent destruction of blasphemers, infidels, and apostates is incontestably a distinct form of religious sacrifice. (3) And as is the case with all such forms of worship, sacrifice is meant to alleviate the death fears of the perpetrator (the "high priest") by bringing death to "others." It is generally believed that the suicide-bomber is fearless, cruel, and not only willing, but even eager to die for the greater glory of Allah. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. The suicide-bomber kills himself in order to avoid death. One must understand that the "death" the suicide-bomber expects to suffer is little more than a momentary inconvenience on the way to eternal life--to immortality. Paradoxically, it is his or her exceptionally acute fear of death that occasions "suicide." (4)

This important conference has explored the links between sacred violence, religion and terrorism. (5) On its face, the dreadful connection between violence and terrorism seems to be a function of religion. (6) Religion, and more specifically Islam, is allegedly the root cause of the problem. This is certainly not incorrect. But I argue that religion here is not the actual underlying cause, but rather the visible part of something much deeper--a deep and enduring pathology in the human spirit, which is now especially pervasive in Islam. I refer to the human fear of death, a fear that much has been written about from the times of Epicurus, (7) Lucretius, Epictetus, (8) and Marcus Aurelius (9) to those of Sigmund Freud, George Santayana, (10) Eugene Ionesco, (11) and Ernest Becker. (12)

There is also a great deal for us to learn about death and eternal life from the Spanish existentialist Miguel de Unamuno, whose Tragic Sense of Life has a marvelous chapter on "The Rationalist Dissolution" and another on "The Hunger of Immortality." (13) How underestimated and ignored is this primal hunger in our still-limited understanding of terrorism, religion, and "sacred violence." Oddly enough, we Americans, Canadians, Australians, and Europeans are fond of projecting our own sense of rationality upon our adversaries. Acknowledging that Western philosophy has always oscillated between Plato and Nietzsche, between rationalism and irrationalism, we have unthinkingly cast our lot with the Greeks and their inheritors. But we are now up against an entirely different ordering of the universe, and we would actually do far better as opponents of terrorism to read Dostoyevsky (14) or Kafka than to dwell on Grotius, Pufendorf or even Jefferson. (15) I am fond of understanding everything (including international law and counter-terrorism) through drama, art, and literature.

I began this paper with a reference to the French playwright Jean Giradoux. Let me now proceed to some equally apt words offered by the Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello. In his Henry IV, we are confronted with the "logic" of madness, a logic before which all of the rules of rational behavior crumble:

Do you know what it means to find yourselves face to face with a madman--with one who shakes the foundations of all you have built up in yourselves, your logic, the logic of all your constructions? Madmen, lucky folk! construct without logic, or rather with a logic that flies like a feather. (16) I'm not at all sure that our present terrorist enemies should be characterized as "mad," but in a practical sense they are certainly energized by a wholly different hierarchy of preferences and values. From the standpoint of international law and world order, (17) we must absolutely and immediately begin to understand the limits of imposing our own notions of compliance and justice upon an altogether different kind of civilization.

For the Judeo-Christian world, the Treaty of Westphalia, as a matter of law, put an end to the idea that an enemy in war was a criminal or heretic upon whom one necessarily waged a war of annihilation. (18) Following the Thirty Years War, this idea was refined and codified in such a way as to render an opponent a "just enemy," or an enemy upon whom one waged limited war in order to protect our purely secular rights. (19) Although there have surely been instances of an absolutely profound disregard for this transforming idea, it has at least been acknowledged in principle as authoritative and normatively binding. (20) Significantly, however, the present and seemingly immutable cry of jihad (21) represents a pre-Westphalian notion of total war that is premised upon the enemy's irremediable lack of sacredness.

To understand the vital linkages between sacred violence, religion, and terrorism, we first need to understand that our present enemies wholly reject our post-Westphalian system of international law. This is a stunning rejection, one with unimaginably grave implications for the so-called "War on Terror," as well as the counter-proliferation effort. (22) It means, inter alia, that all prevailing jurisprudential ideas of treaty-based agreements and other sources of international law (23) listed in Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice only bind us. (24) We are therefore now contending with adversaries who do not accept even the most basic jurisprudential assumptions regarding compromise, negotiation, peaceful settlement, or even humanitarian international law. For the perpetrators of religious extremism international life is largely a zero-sum game, and the only acceptable outcome is a transformation of the dar al-harb into the dar al-Islam. (25)

By itself, violence is not necessarily irrational. In the words of Rene Girard, whose book Violence and the Sacred should be the underlying text for any discussion of religion and terrorism, violence sometimes has its reasons. (26) Girard--with his usual level of sophistication and extraordinary anthropological and literary insight--posits that, "[w]hen unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand." (27)

What does this mean to us? Consider the endlessly barbaric Palestinian insurgency against Israel. (28) What happens when the Israelis build a wall and make the Palestinians' sacrificial killings (suicide bombings) more difficult? The Palestinian Arabs slaughter each other--Hamas murders Fatah and Fatah murders Hamas. (29) Until they can reconcile temporarily, whereupon they both resume the murder of Jews.

Islamic hatred of Israel is rooted in religion, not land. Even before the re-creation of the State of Israel in 1948, considerable support for genocide against "The Jews" was displayed enthusiastically and openly while the Holocaust was underway. (30) On November 21, 1941, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin, met in Berlin with Adolph Hitler. (31) The purpose of this meeting, which followed Haj Amin's organization of SS troops in Bosnia, was to ensure cooperation on "The Jewish Question." (32) It was essential, Haj Amin insisted, that all Jews be sent to countries "where they would find themselves under active control, for example, in Poland, in order thereby to protect oneself from their menace and avoid the consequent damage." (33)

It is also noteworthy that the Palestinians and most other Arabs have never publicly criticized the Mufti's complicity in the Holocaust genocide. During the 1950s and 1960s, Hitler remained an enormously popular figure in the Arab world. (34) Responses amongst these Islamic populations to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961) treated the Nazi mass murderer as a "martyr" and congratulated him for having "conferred a real blessing on humanity" by enacting the Final Solution. (35)

In a prevailing Arab/Islamist view, the Jewish State is always the individual Jew in macrocosm. (36) This Jewish State must be despised because of this relationship---because of the allegedly innate "evil" of the individual Jew. (37) This is very different from the view that Jews should be hated be cause of an association with the State of Israel--as a corollary of being "Zionists." (38) In this view, the Israeli must be loathed not as an "occupier," but because he is a Jew. (39)

In an oft-reprinted article published in al-Ahram, on September 27, 1982, Dr. Lufti Abd al-Azim wrote:

The first thing that we have to make clear is that no distinction must be made between the Jew and the Israeli, which they themselves deny. The Jew is a Jew, through the millennia ... in spurning all moral values, devouring the living and drinking his blood for the sake of a few coins. The Jew, the Merchant of Venice, does not differ from the killer of Deir Yasin or the killer of the camps. They are equal examples of human degradation. Let us therefore put aside such distinctions, and talk only about Jews. (40) In a popular Egyptian textbook of "Arab-Islamic History" used in many teacher-training colleges, we encounter these similar words:

The Jews are always the same, every time and everywhere. They will not live save in darkness. They contrive their evils clandestinely. They fight only when they are...