Understanding Islamic Terrorism as Religious Sacrifice

by Louis René Beres (December 2014)

The rallying cry, always shrill, and always shouted in chorus, exhibits no core differences between ISIS in Iraq or Syria, and Hamas/Fatah in Gaza.

Oddly, this critical observation has been lost upon the administration in Washington. For some as yet undisclosed reason, the president decided to bomb the former, but (effectively) support the latter.

Despite readily discoverable commonalities of Islamist terror, in the particular evolution of Palestinian terror, there exists an almost unique historical narrative. Originally, before an explicitly sacred love of death took its uncompromising hold throughout the Islamic Middle East, the fraternity of Palestinian terrorist groups had brought together several extraordinarily disparate bedfellows.

No more.

Today, the fight has changed from what had once been a preeminently secular and tactical one, to one that draws insistently upon generally unhidden commitments to religious sacrifice. These viscerally primal commitments are discernibly relentless, persistent, and conspicuous.

In the Arab Middle East, where theological doctrine divides carefully into the dar al-Islam (world of Islam) and the dar al-harb (world of war), acts of terror against unbelievers have long been taken as an exemplary expression of sacredness. Here, individual sacrifice derives, in large part, from a fervidly hoped-for conquest of personal death. By adopting such atavistic practice, the Jihadist terrorist expects to realize an otherwise unattainable immortality, not to mention other substantially seductive and corollary benefits.

Jurisprudentially, Israel is being pushed toward complicity in its own literal genocide.

For Jihadists, killing Jews offers the optimal immunization against personal death. Always.

Resembling more explicitly sacrificial elements of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the military wing of Fatah is now oriented toward much more than a purely nationalistic “armed struggle.” It is openly dedicated to religious sacrifice, to a commitment that promises followers not just military victory over “Zionist occupiers,” but, also an immunity from death.  

Never!

Sources:

[2] Sayings of Spartan Mothers

Montevideo Convention”) concerning control over a fixed and clearly defined territory; a population; a government;  and the capacity to enter into diplomatic and foreign relations. See: Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, art. 1, Dec. 26, 1933, 49 Stat. 3097, 165 L.N.T.S. 19.

[6] Done at New York, Dec. 9, 1948. Entered into force, Jan. 12, 1951, 78 U.N.T.S. 277.

Escape From Evil, 2 (1975). Similarly, says psychologist Otto Rank: “The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed.” See: Otto Rank, Will Therapy and Reality 130 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1950((1936).

U.N. Charter, art 53.

[11] See Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Done at Vienna, May 23, 1969. Entered into force, Jan. 27, 1980. U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 39/27 at 289 (1969), 1155 U.N.T.S. 331, reprinted in 8 I.L.M. 679 (1969).

[12] This is an actual expression offered by the great Spanish existentialist, Miguel de Unamuno, in his Tragic Sense of Life (1913).

First published in Israel National News.

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