This Side of Jehenem
Charles Paul Freund | July 26, 2005, 11:20pm
The Washington Post recently ran this front-page follow-up to the intentional massacre of 26 Baghdad children in mid-July. This appalling event was only the most recent such targeting of children by a malevolent jihadi; these murderers presumably believe that by killing themselves and those children standing too near an American, they gain martyrdom and the reward of paradise.
Yet in Arabic, the name of Hell itself is associated with the murder of children. Hell's most common name among Arabs is Jehenem, derived from the Valley of Gehena outside the walls of Jerusalem. In antiquity, this valley was an infamous place of ritual child sacrifice, and the horrors evoked by its name were long ago transferred to the concept of damnation.
In a sense it's quite appropriate that the name for Hell used by so many Muslims has such a root. One of the benefits of Islam's original spread was an end to the once-common pagan practice of infanticide, usually of girl infants, and most commonly by exposure. Jihadis today apparently see such things -- children and murder, Heaven and Hell -- differently.
Skeptikos | July 27, 2005, 9:09am | #
It is always this way with religious radicals. Of course they "betray" the prophet.
Just like Bush, I mean, did you know that Bush's messiah requires him to love and forgive his enemies? Or that Bush's messiah tells him not to pray in public?
Nobody betrays their gods faster than a "fundamentalist", theirs or ours.
If there is one thing Bush and the religious right and the modern Muslims believe in, it is betraying their own most sacred beliefs.
It's like an old joke, just recently Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders in Jerusalem came together and agreed on something....guess what it was?
They all agreed that it is ok to hate gay folks.
We kill children, they kill children, IDF kills children, the Palestinians kill children, the Brits killed children, the IRA killed children....on and on....
and it's against all "our" religions. But we (meaning homo sapiens) do seem to enjoy killing our children.
I like this post, it really points to the absurdity of modern religions that betray themselves.
Hey, isn't one of the commandants that all the religions of the "Book" (Judea-Christian-Muslim) that you aren't even supposed to kill in the first place?
Funny, we want to post the commandants in court houses, just as long as we don't have to pay any attention to them. Funny how they want to live under religious law in the ME, just as long as the leaders are exempt from Allah's laws.
Vynnie | July 27, 2005, 1:24pm | #
can you see how manslaughter is a holdover ...
American law has several levels of culpability ... not that it's the last word in morality, but it might be a basis to add a little structure to this discussion. American courts perceive four categories of culpability, of which I give you extremely oversimplified explanations:
Accident: A reasonable person would not have foreseen that the victim would get hurt. The court does not punish you.
Negligence: You didn't mean to hurt the victim, but you should have been more careful. The court won't impose criminal charges, but the victim's family can sue you civilly.
Recklessness: You didn't mean to harm the specific victim, but you were doing something dangerous and clearly didn't care whether anyone got hurt. You can receive lower-level criminal penalties - if the victim died, you are guilty of manslaughter, but not murder.
Intentional: You meant to hurt the victim, and you did. Full criminal penalties apply - for a death, murder.
Let's all agree that warfare by definition involves intentional murder of enemy soldiers, that nobody has managed to very successfully apply this civil standard to warfare yet, that I've missed all sorts of valid doctrines like self-defense and strict liability, and that I have no idea what Aristotle would have said about late-term abortion.
But maybe if we specify where we think various US, Iraqi, and insurgent actions fall in this continuum we will have a bit clearer discussion than just arguing "it's all intentional" vs. "it's all an accident."
gaius marius | July 27, 2005, 4:59pm | #
man c is dead. man a and man b are both going to prison.
i would say that this is right -- as there is no real situation in which we know that man a and man b had different reasons to kill man c. "intent" is not perfectly divinable, and never will be.
the institution of western law has gone a long way in differentiating criminal intent (evil plans) from simple intent (responsibility). in the hypothetical, man a has criminal intent, man b only simple intent -- but in reality, it is exceedingly difficult to know which of the two, or both or neither, have criminal intent. so both are punished because both are immediately responsible. and if criminal intent can be divined by confession or some other means, then man a gets his heavier sentence.
does the bush administration have criminal intent in starting the iraq war? as an empiricist, i don't know and it doesn't matter. they should be punished, because they started a war which was not a demonstrable response to anything material. and i suspect the reason they lied about wmd and actual 9/11 connections is because they knew they lacked an material event or condition to which it could be a demonstrable response.
does it matter if they genuinely believed that there were wmd and 9/11 connections? no. they went in and there were no such conditions. and they should be punished despite intentions because it puts a heavy social incentive on all parties to act with reasonable moral restraint. if we later find criminal intent, then we can increase the sentence.
what i will *not* assent to is this notion of personal moral intent which says that, if man b did not intend to kill man c, if in fact he had only the best intentions, he is not culpable for the devastation wrought of his actions. it removes the impetus for sensible moderation that is part and parcel to moral behavior, making morality not about society, the victims and the act but about the individual, the perpetrator and his frame of mind.
I, the evil conquerer | July 28, 2005, 1:47am | #
jf,
Is there an award for dumbest comment posted in any given thread?
These awards best given on the spot as the need arises. You just gave the first. But help me now, I'm not sure really not sure how to catagorize this one.
You can play with words any way you want, but the fact remains that they shot and killed a child.
No mention of the "insurgent" animals who deliberately used children for shields....now
this would be a deserving target of gauis' diatribe. But no, that isn't gauis' target.
Instead, this gets "The Most Pathetic Thing gauis marius Ever Said" Award.
mr kwais, that you think killing innocents in one way is better somehow than killing them in another is a very revealing statement to your pathetic amorality.
And after this
that is a very black indictment of how we have evolved in the west, but it is nonetheless as honest i can manage to be.
I won't even try to guess what mental malady afflicts gaius marius. But it seems to involve some sort of philosphical delusions. Unfortunately, we've spent so much on the war in Iraq that they probably had to shut the mental institutions down.
Sadly enough, this means gauis marius will be left to wander the streets. Let's just hope it isn't contagious.
joe,
How about allowing Iraqis to live in peace?
You mean they lived in peace before we got there? Get a grip. This isn't even the core of the problem anymore.
Metalgrid,
It really is a matter of perception isn't it?
Perhaps. But you make me fear that gm's malady really is contagious.
The Bush bashers are blind to the kind of animals we're fighting in Iraq. The Bush lovers (are there any of those left?) are blind to the fact that maybe Bush's reasons for going in were just a tad spurious.
I see few people in the West who are still capable of arriving at a rational grasp of war as a concept. We're predominantly pacifists now. That isn't a good omen for our longevity.
Inability to get a rational grasp of war a) gets us into crap like invading Iraq, and b) makes it a double-whammer because we then give up the cause before we can salvage the few goods that could be gotten from it.
Oddly enough, reality may laugh last at both sides. What nobody is willing to "perceive" -- except kwais, Michael Young (gasp!), and a few others -- is that in spite of it all, Iraq may turn out to be a better place in the long run.
Wouldn't that be a cruel joke?
Of course there are those who will say it wasn't worth the price. It would have been far better if the Iraqi people had bled slowly, for decades or centuries under Saddams, rather than have it all out at once and make one generation pay the whole price.
Freedom has never been had for free. Neither has anything else that was good.
If invading Iraq was a "bad", then the best we can hope for is to pull a "good" out of it via making Iraq a better place.
If that can be done. And I haven't seen the evidence yet showing that it can't be. In fact, kwais' on-location info gives me hope.
