Conveniently, They Want to Die

As our jihadi enemies continue to kill Westerners and Moslems insufficiently whacked out, many in the West continue to harbor the strange notion that there simply must be a reason for the hatred and killing and if only we could identify that reason and correct it, our enemies would leave us alone.

Victor Hanson usefully describes our enemy's grievances against us:

Throughout this war we have an understandable, if ethnocentric, habit of ignoring what our enemies actually say. Instead we chatter on, don’t listen, and in self-absorbed fashion impart our own motives for their hatred. We live on the principles of the Enlightenment and so worship our god Reason, thus assuming that even our adversaries accept such rational protocols as their own.

So they talk on and on of beheading, suicide bombing, another holocaust, and blowing thousands of us up, while we snooze, now and again waking in the midst of a war to regurgitate Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, flushed Korans, the abusive Patriot Act, and the latest quip of Donald Rumsfeld.

But again keep quiet, and listen to radical Islam. ...

So as we try to assess the causes of Islamists’ venom toward the West, it seems wiser to listen to what they say rather than what we say they say.

If we would do that, we would conclude that the hatred of radical Islam is fed by envy, frustration, and pride — and thus existential: They despise Americans for who we are.

That’s why al Qaeda must constantly find new grievances, whether the West Bank, Israel itself, Jews, oil prices, troops in Saudi Arabia, Oil-for-Food, Afghanistan, or Iraq.

So there you go. There are reasons but the reasons are the failure of Islam to even remotely compete with us and create decent societies in the Moslem world. The West has nothing to do with the anger. And as the enemy looks for excuses to kill us, we should understand that they will find them. No matter what. They are mad that we buy their oil. They'd be even madder if we stopped. They say we kill Moslems yet ignore that we have saved lots of Moslems over the years--even from Christians. And of course the angry jihadis ignore that Moslems kill far more Moslems than we could ever be accused of killing.

I find it strange, too, that some argue that we can't fight our enemies because they are eager to die. I find it odd for people to think this is a problem for us. Our enemies hate us and try to kill us. For that reason alone we must fight them. And as long as they are eager to die, kill them. For the only good jihadi is a dead jihadi. And any jihadi we fail to kill this year is just another jihadi we must kill next year.