This Evil Knows No Bounds

By Duncan M. Currie

A small church in Behawalpur, Pakistan—that was the scene of the most recent post-Sept. 11 atrocity. This past Sunday, Islamic extremists spent five minutes spraying gunfire into clusters of Protestant worshippers at St. Dominic’s Roman Catholic Church. The murderers arrived on motorcycles, and according to the Rev. Rocus Patras, they “had whole bags of weapons and bullets.” Among the dead were four children under the age of 12, four women and eight men. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf expressed his outrage at the sudden extermination of these “16 innocent and precious lives.”

Heroic parishioners such as Shamoon Masih, who carried children out of the church before fainting from blood loss, were aghast at the pure viciousness of the act. “They had no mercy for the children,” he lamented. “They had no mercy for the women. They could see that small children were being hit by bullets, but they kept firing.” Pope John Paul II characterized the brutality as a “tragic act of intolerance” that was utterly “evil” in its nature.

Here in America, we have no domestic standards by which to gauge such an abhorrent display of hatred. The idea that women and children could be randomly slaughtered just for their religious beliefs is simply unimaginable. Our society is built upon the principles of open discourse, and we value our freedom to disagree with each other. But to say that a person should not be allowed to live because of their faith is contradictory to the most basic tenets of Western civilization.

Unfortunately, our enemies do not embrace these same values. Radical Islam is rooted in discrimination and intolerance, so much so that its followers consider the lives of all others—that is, anyone who doesn’t believe exactly what they believe—to be worthless. Supporters of Osama bin Laden view Westerners as “infidels,” and they do not acknowledge our right to exist on earth. Let me clarify: they will not be satisfied until every non-Muslim in the world is dead and their beliefs abolished.

As Weekly Standard columnist Charles Krauthammer says, “This kind of fury and fanaticism is unappeasable. It knows no social, economic or political solution.” He stresses, “In its nihilism, its will to power, its celebration of blood and death, its craving for the cleansing purity that comes only from eradicating life and culture, radical Islam is heir, above all, to Nazism.”

Krauthammer points out that the al-Qaeda recruitment tape shows “a two-hour orgy of blood and death,” including “glorious images of desecration of the infidel—mutilated American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of the USS Cole, mangled bodies at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.” How can we reconcile with a culture that celebrates such genocide? Our own civilization’s differences with radical Islam are simply irreconcilable in any diplomatic sense. We are fighting not only to eliminate a source of hatred and destruction from the world, but also to help the peace-loving, impoverished peoples of Afghanistan experience the wonders of freedom.

Unfortunately, endorsing the West can get you in trouble these days. In September, Italian Prime Minister Silvio-Berlusconi was criticized by the Arab League after telling reporters, “We should be conscious of the superiority of our civilization, which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it, and guarantees respect for human rights and religion. This respect certainly does not exist in Islamic countries.” His remarks were denounced as bigoted, narrow-minded and racist.

These accusations are inaccurate. Western civilization is superior to the culture of radical Islam. That doesn’t mean that Americans or Westerners are superior to Arabs. But the West allows for greater individual freedom and personal advancement. If the people of Afghanistan were given American liberties, I doubt their country would not be prosperous, peaceful and democratic, just like ours.

More importantly, believing in capitalism, religious tolerance, free speech and democracy does not make you a racist. I feel nothing but the deepest empathy for Afghanistan’s starving population. Besides food drops, it is important that we work to establish a successor regime to the Taliban. Muslims are being held hostage by sociopaths who, as President Bush intimated, “blaspheme the name of Allah” and “hijack Islam itself.” The religion of Islam has been cast as a violent, destructive faith by such radical terrorists. Yet the terrorists’ tactics separate them from the vast majority of Muslims in the world. They are killers before they are Muslims, and they support murder before they support Islam.

The men in Pakistan who opened fire on St. Dominic’s Church must have believed that their actions had some higher purpose and value. Like so many others in the Middle East, they have been brainwashed by nefarious preachers such as bin Laden. In many ways, their lives, along with those of the people they kill, have been sacrificed on the pyre of his hatred. It is time we put an end to this lethal cycle of propaganda and blood.

Those who recently died in Behawalpur were the victims of an evil we haven’t seen since World War II. It cheers when women and children bleed to death. Its powerful nihilism threatens Western civilization. Most importantly, it is an evil that must be stopped.

The St. Dominic’s massacre should only strengthen our resolve in the ongoing military battle against the Taliban. Pakistan’s small Christian minority has been devastated, but we will achieve justice for the murdered parishioners. Above all, their tragic deaths should remind us of the urgency of our task and the righteousness of our mission.

Duncan M. Currie ’04 is a history concentrator in Leverett House.