Explosion in the Mosque
Watching terrorists use a mosque as a military installation, hiding in it and firing from it but demanding immunity from return fire, is causing some readers to experience deja vu. The Shrine of Najaf. The Church of the Nativity. We’ve been there.
Watching terrorists use a mosque as a military installation, hiding in it and firing from it but demanding immunity from return fire, is causing some readers to experience deja vu. The Shrine of Najaf. The Church of the Nativity. We’ve been there.
We’ve also been somewhere else. Yesterday’s mortar barrage that hit the Kufa mosque was quickly blamed on American forces despite the extraordinary care the U.S. has been taking to avoid damaging holy sites. “It looks like Sarajevo down there,” said an American colonel in The Washington Post, adding, “Or rather, the stuff that’s supposed to look like Sarajevo looks like Sarajevo. The minarets still look like minarets.”
Recognize this? Iraqi police arrested al-Sadr aides with gold, money, jewels and other valuables taken from the Imam Ali Shrine as they withdrew from the fighting in Najaf.
Withdrew? Wait a minute. Haven’t these guys pledged to fight to the death? Aren’t they looking for the glory of martyrdom?
No. The real deja-vu is that in al-Sadr we see Arafat, Saddam, Junior Assad, and the Mullahs. We see Yassin, Khomeini, Senior Assad and Nasser – all late, all unlamented. We see the leaders of madrassahs and mosques in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Britain and France. We see a million Iranian boys sent to march through the minefields with keys and Korans. We see 11-year-olds wired with explosive devices and sent through Israeli checkpoints. We see children poisoned with hate and nurtured on grievance. We see millions of girls uneducated and hidden away until someone needs a girl as a “martyr.”
We see a struggle for power and wealth among men of varying degrees of presumed religiosity, but all equally vicious, dictatorial and willing to wage war on the backs of the poor. We see men who prey on the troubles and fears of the people around them, agitate for others to die while they, their families and their cadres fill their coffers. They kill and wail for sympathy; cynical vampires living off the blood of others.
The mosque in Kufa was full of people called upon to march on Najaf in support of al-Sadr and his cronies – even as al-Sadr’s men were leaving with the loot. (By the way, has anyone actually seen al-Sadr lately? The rumor is that he’s already in Iran, leaving his guys to face the music.) Suddenly, mortars from an unknown source hit the mosque and the U.S. was blamed for killing civilians. Call us cynical, but does the name Mohammad al-Dura ring a bell?
This is the swamp. This is the war. Not for Iraq or against Moslems, it is against a fascist mentality pervasive in the Arab world and threading through Islamic thought as presented by certain Islamic teachers. In other times, we might have ignored the wholesale repression of people by their (unelected) leaders as long as those (unelected) leaders sold us oil. But in this age of instant communications, widespread legal and illegal immigration, rapid travel and small-volume weapons that can bring massive death and destruction, we have no choice but to take the fight to them and win.