Justification

[rowyn]

Everyone has a story they tell themselves. A story that explains it all, that justifies it. Why it was the right thing to do. Why it made sense at the time. Why you are a good person.

"It was just a little white lie." "I didn't want to hurt his feelings." "She wanted it." "They've got so much, they'll never miss it." "He was asking for it." "It wasn't part of the contract." "Insurance will cover it." "I didn't know."

Everyone is the protagonist in their own story.

And I just want to know, what is yours?

Comments

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

Something about how their government is a vassal of Washington, (not entirely untrue) and that innocent deaths are a tragic necessity of a struggle to expel a colonizing infidel power.

I am not cool with these guys, I'm pretty sure they'd love to chop my head off, along with the heads of virtually all my friends. I just think that this is what's going through their heads.

[rowyn]

I don't think the bombers regarded the deaths and injuries of dozens of schoolgirls as particularly tragic. They put the bomb next to the school. It wasn't incidental that they targetted it. So these are people who reasoned that killing kids was a good way to get whatever it is that they want.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

Perhaps not tragic, perhaps merely regrettable. :p I agree there's no question that they place their goals above innocent lives.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

I think that it is not even regrettable, for them -- since the girl's schools are a primary target. That may have been true in this case as well; the little I saw on this grim bit suggested that the soldiers' deaths were incidental to the attack.

A girl with an education is already dead to them, and they've killed many. Sending your female child to a school is an act worthy of death, for you, your family, and the child of course; they've carried out thousands of such sentences in recent years.

You are correct, I think, in that you (and I) would not be suffered to live. But, to address the Lady Rowyn's original thought, I believe that these Muslim Brotherhood branches would have no difficulty at all justifying their actions.

The writings of Sayyid Qutb are informative as to how these people think; he was one of the early guiding lights of the Muslim Brotherhood, and translations (of "Milestones," for example) are readily available in English. Qutb's brother Mohammed (who was still alive four years ago) was Usama bin Ladin's instructor in college, but there were many MB members who went from Egypt to Saudi Arabia then elsewhere.

It isn't just that your personal practices and mine are considered Satanic -- they use this label for almost all Muslims as well. We're just particularly bad, having non-standard sexual practices or religious philosophies (the only standard is strict Sunni Shari'a Islam) -- but anyone not practicing their strict Shari'a laws is subject to being killed at leisure.

Children, to them, are not responsibilities to be protected; they're simply easier targets to kill than usual.

The Muslim world is under threat from these people just as is the West, and the MB organizations kill many times more Muslims than Westerners. We just don't pay as much attention to those incidents.

===|==============/ Level Head

[rowyn]

It's the last paragraph that gets me. It's hard to imagine the 'we'll murder your young children' philosophy attracting a lot of willing adherents. :(

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Sadly, they've even been successful at "we'll convince you to murder your OWN children for the sake of honor and purity."

Such "honor killings" run several thousand a year. Westerners think of this as being a sexual purity/marriage related thing, but the most common honor killings are for dress code violations.

The problem grows larger, but our focus on it has reduced because of political considerations. A decade ago there was less political squeamishness, and that's when this Human Rights Watch report was prepared:
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1999/pakistan/

===|==============/ Level Head

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Here's a Muslim's thoughtful take on honor killings (with grim details):
http://www.islam-watch.org/SyedKamranMirza/honor_killing.htm

===|==============/ Level Head

[rowyn]

This sort of thing -- 'how do you justify that?' -- goes through my head every time I hear some particularly unbelievable bit of news. Like the man who kept his daughter and the grandchildren of his rapes of her locked in his basement for decades. How does a human being do those things? I try to wrap my head around it and can't. Which is perhaps just as well.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

The jihadist war, and the terrorist organizations involved, rise from the teachings and operations of the Muslim Brotherhood -- an organization founded eighty years ago by (ironically and sadly) an elementary school teacher. His name was Hasan al-Banna.

His writings, and those of followers in his footsteps including Usama bin Ladin, have no end of justification and rationalization for such acts.

They divide the world into the people of Allah (just their own group) and the people of Satan (which includes all non-traditional and non-Sunni Muslims). Killing the people of Satan, to them, is not murder; it is merely purification.

As Sheik Yousef al-Qaradawi (MB leader and head of the European Council on Fatwa and Research) put it recently, "There is no dialogue between them and us other than in one language -- the language of the sword and force."

On BBC TV, he said "Allah Almighty is just; through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have, and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do."

He has no problem, I think, justifying what we describe as atrocities.

And the MB considers the education of girls to be an atrocity; they've been bombing girls' schools in Pakistan for years (this one was 2008).

===|==============/ Level Head

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Mine? Oh! You meant the bombers.

Probably, 'The prohibition against striking civilian targets is a self-serving fiction they've invented to convince us to bash our heads against their swords and armor. But we're smarter than that, we can strike the TRUE targets. The school where they poison the children is the real attack that we must defend against.'

I wrote something like that as the manifesto for WOMBAT, an even more insane terrorist organization than the rest of the anti-devilbunny forces.

[rowyn]

I wouldn't mind hearing your story, either. O:)

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I think I lost the plot years ago, so it's kind of a mess. Every so often something inexplicable will happen that's probably the result of a broken scenario -- it would have made sense if I'd managed to hit all the plot points before it.