In The Guardian, cultural theorist Terry Eagleton pontificates on the meaning of the Islamist act of suicide bombing. His first maneuver is to simply deny the death cult, and blame the victims’ society instead:
Like hunger strikers, suicide bombers are not necessarily in love with death. They kill themselves because they can see no other way of attaining justice; and the fact that they have to do so is part of the injustice.
Hmm.. did Eagleton miss the videotaped statement of the ‘vanguard’ Reem Reyashi, just before she killed four Israelis and herself in Gaza last year? Said Reem:
I always wanted to be the first woman who sacrifices her life for Allah. My joy will be complete when my body parts fly in all directions.
Eagleton then likens suicide terrorists to their actual victims:
It is possible to act in a way that makes your death inevitable without actually desiring it. Those who leapt from the World Trade Centre to avoid being incinerated were not seeking death, even though there was no way they could have avoided it.
He goes on to analyze the phenomenon as the supreme act of human rebellion, on par with the great heroic figures from western literature:
Like the traditional tragic hero, the suicide bomber rises above his own destruction by the very resolution with which he embraces it.
Muhammad Atta was the modern-day Romeo, you see.
Eagleton never bothers addressing the fact that the Islamist suicide bomber murders others along the way, other than reflecting that commuter bus terrorism has ‘a smack of avant garde theatre’ to it.
How ironic that Eagleton, one of the foremost practitioners of postmodern theory, is unable to allow the cultural ‘other’ to define his reality for himself, but rather feels compelled to project his own, western humanist personality upon the death-happy Islamist.
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