Pharaoh and the Gosnellification of Terrorists

So, yet again, Bronze Age savages with 21st century technology have inflicted a wound on civilization by demonstrating that a statistically significant swath of the Religion of Peace can’t cope with people who make fun of it. The massacre in Paris is one of a thousand others like it and we recognize that this kind of Radical Muslim evil is of a piece with similar acts around the world. Not all, or even most, Muslims do this filth but this filth one of the major exports of Islam nonetheless and Muslims have to do far better in extirpating these people and destroying their power. Of which more in a second.

The question is, what do we do about it?

One thing to ask is “What are the savages hoping we do about it?” Several things are sought by terrorist tactics. Terror (duh), anger, stupidity, rashness, and folly are all desirable outcomes for the terrorist. They all lead us victims to make ourselves more, not less, his victims. He doesn’t have a lot of staff and he doesn’t have a lot of firepower. So the idea is to use technology as a force multiplier: to make it so a handful of Bronze Age thugs dominate, first the airwaves, and then our emotions for years to come. From a purely tactical standpoint, it’s a smart move for people with limited resources and, as 9/11 demonstrates, it can be enormously successful–if the victims don’t wise up to the strategy.

And happily for the terrorists, our media are incredibly slow to wise up. So this news cycle on this story promises to go on and on and on, making these guys superstars. First, will be the breathless reportage on the Manhunt. Then, the hyperfocus on the biographies of each of the savages, with photos and names and interviews with those who knew them (“He was quiet, kept to himself”) and analyses of their motivations and terrified speculations on where people like this might strike next and breast beating about the “chilling effect” this will have on a free press and color stories on “Terrorism in Our Schools: IS *YOUR* CHILD NEXT?” and, of course, calls from the Fear News Network to “over-militarize our police“. Because only the transformation of America into a police state that regards the population as enemy combatants who should be tortured, or shot first and questions asked later, can keep us safe.

All this, which promises safety, only delivers power into the hands of terrorists. It makes them famous (even in death), places us in the permanent thrall of fear of them, and turns us (as evil always seeks to do) into the image and likeness of that which we hate.

So what can we do instead? Well, I think Exodus gives us an interesting clue. The name of Exodus is, in Hebrew, the Book of Names (books in the Hebrew Bible take their titles, as papal Encyclicals do, from their opening words. Exodus begins “These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his household” (Ex 1:1).) And indeed, Exodus is all about names, among other things. In it, we learn the origin of Moses’ name (and, as ever, the name of a person is shown to be fraught with power and significance). “Moses” is derived from a word meaning “to draw out” and that name tells us everything we need to know about who he is. He himself is “drawn out” of the Nile and his entire life mission will be to draw Israel out of Egypt. Likewise, Exodus is the book in which the electrifying revelation of God’s Name is made.

The analogy I sometimes use to get at the stunning change of relationship is to tell the reader to think of some august figure in their life: your fourth grade teacher, for instance. My fourth grade teacher was (and forever shall be) Mr. Vaughn. That’s *Mr.* Vaughn to you, buster. And when you grow up and are a young married man with a job and growing list of grown up type accomplishments, you suddenly find yourself in the drugstore checkout line and turn around. Who is standing there? Mr. Vaughn! You say, “Hello, Mr. Vaughn! Nice to see you again!” and he, after figuring out who you are with the beard and the child in tow, looks at you and says, “Please! Call me Jim.” You freeze. “I… um… Can I *do* that?” It feels so wrong. So *intimate* to call the great and terrible Mr. Vaughn “Jim”, like you are friends or something. It’s too weird. Too forward!

That’s just a dim shadow of what Israel felt about this exchange:

Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the sons of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” * And he said, “Say this to the sons of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ”(Ex 3:13–14).

But there is another side to this biblical narrative too, because there is another character, near the heart of the narrative, who (like a terrorist) inflicts great sufferings on the people of Israel, and yet we never learn his name. He is known only as Pharaoh.

I think there is great wisdom in this refusal to name Pharaoh, and you see it repeated throughout biblical revelation and even on into the Christian tradition. You see it in the psalms:

You have rebuked the nations, you have destroyed the wicked; you have blotted out their name for ever and ever. The enemies have vanished in everlasting ruins; their cities you have rooted out; the very memory of them has perished. But the LORD sits enthroned for ever (Ps 9:5–7).

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May his posterity be cut off; may his name be blotted out in the second generation! May the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the LORD, and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out! Let them be before the LORD continually; and may his memory be cut off from the earth! (Ps 109:13–15).

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The mourning of men is about their bodies, but the evil name of sinners will be blotted out. Have regard for your name, since it will remain for you longer than a thousand great stores of gold. The days of a good life are numbered, but a good name endures for ever.(Sir 41:11–13).

The Christian tradition does something about this in a very concrete way. Lemme ask you: what’s the name of the guy who set fire to St. Polycarp? How about the name of the bishop who ordered the execution of Joan d’Arc? I can’t for the life of me remember who killed St. Margaret Clitherow, or Perpetua and Felicity, or the Hiroshima Martyrs. I’m sure some of them are footnoted in a book somewhere, but there’s very little focus on them. Instead, the focus is placed on the name of the victim. We “have regard” for *their* name. We focus on *them*. We consign, as much as possible, the name of their betrayer, or killer, to oblivion. We imitate the apostles who–instead of perseverating over the disgusting betrayal of Judas as we have perseverated over every mass murderer from bin Laden to yesterday’s outrage–simply declared ‘Let his habitation become desolate, and let there be no one to live in it’; and ‘His office let another take.’(Ac 1:20). We refuse to let the psychic vampire occupy an inch more real estate in our attentions than to document what happened and instead turn our hearts and minds resolutely to life.

In the case of the apostles, that life was, of course, the Life of the Risen Christ. But in our case, it is the life of the victim of the murderer. What was worth celebrating? How can we honor them? How can we imitate their virtues, or forgive their shortcomings? How can we be masters of this situation with love and virtue and not cattle driven by fear and anger?

The early Church, which was hagridden by persecutions and acts of terror orders of magnitude more terrifying than the kind of filth inflicted by the savages in Paris yesterday, got this. It refused to be cowed and, what is far more, refused to be conformed to the image of its persecutors by hating them back. It knew the truth of Chesterton’s remark that “Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.” It could say with St. Lawrence as he was being roasted to death, “You can turn me over. I’m done on this side now” or with St. Thomas More, ascending the scaffold, “See me safely to the top. I will shift for my self coming down.” It could, with the apostles, rejoice at being counted worthy to suffer for the Name. Imitating Jesus, who forgave his murderers, it went to the graves of the martyrs and, instead of chewing the cud of their murderer’s names and hyperfocusing on the threat of more to come, it prayed to and celebrated the lives of the victims with gratitude to God.

I think that something analogous should begin to happen in our culture. Obviously, I’m not saying we venerate the raunchy and raucous satirists at Charlie Hebdo as saints. Their work was crass and insulting, not only of Muslims but of everybody, Christians not least. Indeed, as a matter of conscience, I will not join the stampede to say “Je suis Charlie”, because I am not going to sprinkle Holy Water on filth like this in the name of the Church of Neocon Americanism. It’s not about blessing their blasphemies, but their right to life, their guts in confronting terror, and their willingness to face that down even to the death.

More than that, it is not about picking a side in the war between Christ-hating secularism and Christ-hating Radical Islam. It’s about siding with Christ against both and on behalf of those trapped in both evil systems. And it is, by the way, about gratitude for the fact that, despite the filthy blasphemy in that link above, the Christian tradition is still strong enough that it is unthinkable that Christians would have been the ones to burst into that office and slaughter people for a cartoon. Everyone knows that when such acts occur, you are not waiting for the dreadful news that Methodists or the Knights of Columbus have done it again. The name “Mohammed” whether as inspiration or perpetrator will *always* appear in the story somewhere.

So I am saying that, beyond the bare minimum we need to know about their killers, we should turn the *whole* of our focus to (in this case) the courage of a press that stood up to these Bronze Age goons. We should likewise celebrate the heroism of the teachers at Sandy Hook, the rescue workers on 9/11, the good and valorous deeds done to stop such goons and help their victims. We should blot out the names of terrorists and mass murderers. If they die in a gun battle with the cops, it should be mentioned as an addendum to the closing local story on the eccentric with the beer cap collection (“finally, the criminals responsible for the massacre in Paris are dead after resisting arrest. We won’t be showing any footage of that. That’s the news for tonight”). If captured, coverage of their trials should be minimal and consigned to an occasional feed on the bottom of the screen. They should be jailed forever (not executed and “martyred”). They should be warehoused and forgotten. The fire of fame should be suffocated. Only the memory of their victims should be exalted.

The press has the power to do that if they want to. Just look at the bangup job they did of ignoring the giant bleeding wound of Kermit Gosnell’s slaughterhouse. Look at how, each Roe v. Wade Day, 50,000 people can converge on Washington and San Francisco and you would never know it from the perfunctory and dismissive mention it gets in the media. Meanwhile, let 10 angry abortion zealots form a little knot somewhere back by the Lincoln Memorial while the whole Mall is filled with prolifers from the Reflecting Pool to the steps of the Capitol and the cameras are all on the abortion zealots (cuz that’s “balance”, doncha know).

I say the media that has spent a decade making every maniac and fiend a superstar should instead consciously devote itself to doing to these goons what it does to the prolife movement without even trying. It should obliterate all attention to these thugs, it should focus entirely on the memory and virtues of their victims, and it should thus suffocate this tactic of terror of all tactical value.

Relatedly, the Fear Network should stop glorifying these garage band jackasses as being “at war” with us. This is something a lot more like disorganized crime than a “war” and butchers like this should be treated more like members of a crappy crime syndicate than like scary members of an “army”. The last thing we should do is panic and turn ourselves into a police state in response to them. We should assert our freedom, not our terror. And we should avoid the hysterical panic of declaring “war” on a religion of a billion people. The vast majority of victims of these sorts of criminal savages are other Muslims. Like it or not, this societal disease is a disease that is going to *have* to be fought, in huge measure, by Muslims. So we should cultivate ties with the sane elements in the Islamic world and not say stupid panic-driven stuff like “They’re *all* animals” and “We will do whatever it takes to stop them”.

Our “doing whatever it takes” was one of the many stupid things the terrorists of 9/11 thanked Allah for us doing. It made thousands of converts to their cause. Nota bene, Catholic Torture Defenders:

“Cherif Kouachi was previously known to the authorities, as he was convicted by a French court in 2008 of trying to travel to Iraq to fight in that country’s insurgent movement. Kouachi told the court that he wished to fight the American occupation after viewing images of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.”

The weapons of our warfare do not include “whatever it takes” because as the Catechism says, in a passage that applies to all forms of human conflict and not merely war, “The Church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict. ‘The mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties.'”

The reason for that is twofold. Embracing “ends justify the means” thinking is both evil *and* stupid. It makes us into them, and it makes neutral parties into enemies instead of allies. We’ve had a decade of fighting terror stupidly and it’s sent a very clear message to Bronze Age savages, “Terror pays.” It’s time we stopped giving these guys what they want and, more than that, giving the powers and principalities that inspire them what they want: a Christian population (at least nominally so) that is farther from Christ, controlled not by the Spirit but by panic, fear, anger, and rash folly.

Here’s what an early victim of anti-Christian terror said about how to fight just war:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having fastened the belt of truth around your waist, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace; besides all these, taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the Evil One. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints. (Eph 6:10–18).

Find these savages, bury their names in oblivion. Refuse to be controlled by either fear or rage. Honor their victims. Imitate Christ, not his enemies. Only mention them (and that only rarely) to make fun of them, as Darrin Bell so brilliantly does.  For the devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked:

That is how we fight the good fight–and the smart fight.