The news out of Iraq is horrific. Every day, hundreds of innocent people are killed or wounded in attacks, many of them suicide bombings. Nothing seems to be off-limits: bakeries, mosques, funeral and religious processions, schools-any congregation of people can be a target.
One cannot help but be amazed by the sheer number of Muslim youth ready to blow themselves up to kill fellow Muslims, with bombing victims usually among the poorest and most defenseless in society.
At first glance, this situation looks paradoxical. To lay down one’s life willfully presupposes a morally worthy cause, but what moral justification is possible for blowing oneself up to kill a woman queuing for bread in a Shia slum in Baghdad? Credit for many of these gruesome acts is later proudly claimed by a host of self-glorified groups. What moral degeneracy is at work here?
The most troubling aspect of this daily slaughter of innocent Muslims by suicide bombers is that the attacks are seen by the perpetrators as a way to fulfill Islam’s most sacred aspirations. There has to be some kind of ideological assembly line that churns out this apparently endless supply of suicide bombers who believe that, by killing themselves and innocent bystanders, they will be rewarded by God. In goes a desperate, hopeless youth full of rage at an indifferent world, and out comes a mindlessly destructive time bomb.
What regrettably guarantees the continuation of this sinister process is the bewildered silence of most traditional Muslim leaders. To be sure, the past silence of the moral leaders of the community has made the work of the wicked recruiters of suicide bombers much easier. No loud-and-clear condemnation was heard when the (no less innocent victims) of suicide bombing were from outside the Muslim community. The crooked rationale of suicide bombing here was that civilians who live in the “enemy camp” are assisting the enemy, and therefore are legitimate targets.
But now, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the inhuman logic has come full circle. Muslim suicide bombers are killing fellow Muslims suspected of aiding the enemy, in hopes of going to heaven. What a dark consequence of the much-glorified concept of martyrdom, and what an effective and apparently inexhaustible weapon for sinister terrorist operatives to use in rooting out all competition on the road to creating a new tyranny.
The first step toward putting an end to this mad carnage is to call the act of daily killing of innocent civilians by suicide bombers by its rightful name: criminal. Suicide bombing against innocent civilians must be stripped of all its glory and its perpetrators paraded around for what they really are: murderers who believe in nothing but furthering their twisted political agenda. The traditional religious leadership must wake up and declare their opposition loudly and clearly before they too fall victim to this criminality.
The only effective way to curtail this destruction is for every member of the worldwide Muslim community, starting with its leaders, to condemn it. Hopefully, the large pool of suicide volunteers will begin to dry up once this abhorrent practice is shunned by the whole community.
