David Brooks in today’s New York Times identifies the evil that so many refuse to accept:
We’ve been forced to witness the massacre of innocents. In New York, Madrid, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Baghdad and Bali, we have seen thousands of people destroyed while going about the daily activities of life.
We’ve been forced to endure the massacre of children. Whether it’s teenagers outside an Israeli disco or students in Beslan, Russia, we’ve seen kids singled out as special targets…
the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It’s about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying.
It’s about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It’s about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism – freedom even from human nature, which says, Love children, and Love life. It’s about the joy of sadism and suicide.
We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don’t want to stare into this abyss. We don’t want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.
Brooks points out the media’s role in the delusion:
If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible targets for their rage.
The Boston Globe editorial, which was typical of the American journalistic response, made two quick references to the barbarity of the terrorists, but then quickly veered off with long passages condemning Putin and various Russian policy errors.
Sounds awfully familiar to those who have followed coverage of the Palestinian terror campaign.
