Every living being stands as a rebuke to those whose only love is carnage and destruction, simply by virtue of having life.
By Robert Spencer, Frontpage Magazine
One result of the gruesome October 7 jihad attacks in Israel is that the general public is seeing the naked bloodlust of Islamic jihadists, which the establishment media and Leftist authorities have done all they could to conceal for years.
The UK Express reported Monday that among the footage that Israel recently released of the Hamas jihad massacres of October 7, there is an audio file of “a Hamas terrorist ringing his mother with one of his victim’s phones, saying: ‘I killed 10 Jews with my own hands. I’m using the dead Jewish woman’s phone to call you now.’” The proud mother responds: “May Allah protect you.”
The mind boggles. What could possibly account for this mindset? What’s more, how could anyone possibly think that these gleeful murderers, taking joy in the deaths of those whom they hate, could have the moral high ground? Yet it is clear now that all too many people in the West assume that they do. Few understand how deep this love of death really goes.
Back in April 2020, a Syrian opposition journalist, Khatib Badla, explained that Muslim Arabs “have a trait that distinguishes us from all the other peoples of the world, which is a love of death. We dream of it, regard it as a source of inspiration and think about it every day. We love death and love the dead. Instead of hoping for longevity, for [a life of] giving and loving, we say, with defeatism… ‘God, [help me] go to battle and reach my grave. This is in addition to the grand slogans we [like to chant], such as: ‘death to America,’ ‘better death than humiliation’ and ‘seek death and you shall be given life [in the next world].’”
Badla was right, and the attitudes and assumptions that he so ably described are quite pervasive among Islamic jihadis. They generally tend to idolize murder and love death, as they frequently affirm. As police were closing in on him, Boston Marathon jihad murderer Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wrote on the wall of the pleasure boat in which he was hiding: “You are fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven.”
Tsarnaev wasn’t remotely singular in this. Muslim teenage girls from Austria who traveled to Syria for jihad announced: “Death is our goal.” Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said: “I’m even longing for death, you vagabond.” In 2021, as his enemies closed in on him, Shekau treated himself to the object of his longing.
In 2012, a Muslim child preacher taunted those he has been taught to hate most: “Oh Zionists, we love death for the sake of Allah, just as much as you love life for the sake of Satan.” In France that same year, jihad mass murderer Mohamed Merah, who murdered little children inside a Jewish school, said that he “loved death more than they loved life.”
Al-Qaeda top dog Ayman al-Zawahiri’s wife once advised Muslim women: “I advise you to raise your children in the cult of jihad and martyrdom and to instill in them a love for religion and death.”
And as one jihadist summed it up, “We love death. You love your life!” Afghan jihadist Maulana Inyadullah years ago said the same, while demonstrating a gift for a memorable phrase: “The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death.” More probably prefer Coca-Cola, but we get the idea.
This idea is not actually the strange opinion of a gang of “extremists.” It comes from the Qur’an itself: “Say, O you who are Jews, if you claim that you are favored of Allah apart from mankind, then long for death if you are truthful.” (62:6)
This is one reason why the forces of Hamas and its allies can never win in the long run: loving death is not natural. Loving life is. The young man who happily called home to boast to his mother about having murdered Jews has as his unwitting opponents the multitudes of people, Jews and non-Jews, in the West who are thrilled when they can save a life, not destroy one. When the lovers of life face off against the lovers of death, they have multitudes of silent allies: every living being stands as a rebuke to those whose only love is carnage and destruction, simply by virtue of having life.
Life is, as we have always been told, a gift. As the world looks on in horror at those who rejoice in destroying it, we are reminded in the most vivid possible way of how precious it is. And now the time has come to defend that principle, or face even greater horrors than what we saw on October 7.