The Terrorists are Always the Victim

By Daniel Greenfield —— Bio and Archives January 2, 2009

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Want to open fire on a passing family sedan? How about setting off a bomb in a crowded pizzeria? How about beating in a 4 year old girl's head with a rock? Or hijacking a jet plane and flying it into a crowded skyscraper killing thousands?

If you're a terrorist, the one thing you can count on is always being the victim. Shoot, stab, bomb, kill, maim and massacre-- but when your victims get tired of taking it and come after you, they'll be the bad guys and you'll be the victim. It's easy, just run to a populated area where you have plenty of supporters and hide. After the raid meant to take you out is over, grab a body, hold it up to the cameras and scream that you're the victim. And if that fails and you actually get captured and stuck in a cell somewhere, the moment they let you see a lawyer or reporter, scream that you're been tortured and abused-- because when you're a terrorist, you're always the victim. When the terrorist kills, his victims are told that they brought it on themselves. When the terrorist becomes the hunted, he's suddenly an object of pathos and pity. Columnists pen fiery screeds about the soulless military minds who could describe civilian casualties are collateral damage. Naturally terrorists never talk about collateral damage, because killing civilians is the whole point of terrorism. The only people who talk about collateral damage are soldiers who have not set out to kill civilians. Entertainers, who you can be certain never bothered to condemn a single terrorist attack or offer a helping hand to the survivors stuck with crippling injuries for life, suddenly begin speaking about how awful this whole violence thing is, and wonder why we can't all just live in peace. As if anyone was disturbing their Beverly Hills mansions. And when the media is done throwing up the staged and photoshopped pictures assembled by their local stringers, many of whom are loosely affiliated with the very terrorist groups involved in the fighting, the world bemoans not the actions of the terrorists, but the measures taken to fight them. Typically words like "Disproportionate Response" are thrown about. Not that it's clear what exactly a proportionate response to terrorism would involve. Maybe randomly firing rockets into their town and cities for years. Or hijacking one of their planes and flying it into a heavily populated area. Or perhaps planting a bomb on one of their buses. Naturally the heavy thinkers who offer up such criticisms rarely have much to say on that, or on the morality of "an Eye for an Eye" combat, rather than the "You Poke Out My Eye, I Cut Off Your Hand So You Can't Do That Anymore" combat which we currently employ. But it's not as if this sort of "Murderer Centered Morality" so in vogue among progressive types began last week or around the time a greasy bearded Egyptian terrorist with the face of a frog, donned a Keffiyeh, declared himself a Palestinian, and began sending out terrorists to murder Israeli schoolchildren. Think of how many people wear T-shirts with the face of Che on them, and how many people wear T-shirts with the faces of any of his thousands of victims. Songs were written for Caryl Chessman, none were written for the women he victimized. Eldridge Cleaver was a hero, the black girls he talked about "practicing on" in the ghetto for the "revolutionary act" of rape, or the women he graduated to raping, are faceless and anonymous. They don't matter. The ACLU has much to say on behalf of the Al Qaeda terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. They have nothing to say for the men and women who jumped from the burning towers, and whose images have been neatly erased from the newscasts. The terrorists are victims. Their victims' final screams have been silenced. This is the ugly face of a progressive politics, that cheers the terrorist and the murderer as the underdog protesting society's oppression, while dismissing his victims as pawns of the oppressive system. Moderation, appeasement and attempts to find common ground-- earn nothing but scorn from terrorists and their Western liberal accomplices. In place of morality, they have only a mythology in which they are the heroes and the mass graves they and theirs have dug from Cuba to Siberia, from Cambodia to Columbia, from Iran to China, from Iraq to Ground Zero hold tens of millions of faceless men, women and children who deserved to die.