Accounting for the Barbarism

Why would Arabs murder a family of Jewish settlers in such a savage manner? As Andrew McCarthy points out, they were only following orders, so to speak:

Muslims are frequently found carrying out the Koranic directive to “strike terror into the hearts of the unbelievers.” Actually, make that the Koranic theme, so often is it reiterated in the scriptures devout Muslims take to be the verbatim commands of Allah. (See, e.g., Suras 3:151, 8:12–13, 8:60, 9:5, 33:25–27, 59:2–4, 59:13.) And that is beside the hadith, scriptures in which Mohammed, taken to be the perfect Muslim role model, boasts, “I have been made victorious with terror.” (Bukhari 4.52.220 — just scroll down from here, through the glories promised to Muslims who wage jihad against the infidels.)

Muslims, in fact, are more often exhorted by their scriptures to brutalize non-Muslims than Christians are urged by the gospels to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. Yet, though we assume the latter are meant to take the message to heart, we are somehow sure Islam doesn’t really mean what it says — that when Muslims strike terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, it must be Israel’s fault, or America’s, or something, anything, other than Islam, the only common denominator in these attacks.

For U.S. officials, it is a bridge too far to acknowledge the welter of doctrinal grounding that supports these atrocities. Sort the deranged likes of Jared Loughner from the ideologically driven adherents of Islam? Observe the chasm between mentally disturbed killers and mentally conditioned killers? No way.

No, best to file it under "cycle of violence" or "man-caused disaster" and pretend that the ideologically driven behaviour is aberrant and unusual and a perversion of the Koran. Much easier to sleep nights that way.