Terror in France and the annals of willful blindness

You may be a haughty American progressive, but not everybody is. You may roll your eyes over quaint notions like religious obligation, but not everybody is equally evolved. Not everybody is convinced that bloody sectarian conflict — the norm of history — is just as obsolete as the rule of law in the age of Obama.

I had to fight of the urge to throw my television out the window Thursday evening. Images of bodies strewn across the promenade along the Côte d’Azur were interrupted by one vapid pol after another, brought on set to condemn the “cowardly” jihadist. Cowardly? Do you think you could drive a truck through a mass of humanity and then shoot it out with trained security personnel, knowing all the while that you were going to die? Our enemies are barbaric savages, but cowards? To do what our enemies do requires nerve, fervor — a cause they believe is worthy of the raging passion Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al Banna called “the art of death.”

The fervor comes from their ideology. It has this terrifying hold on them because it is credibly drawn from their religious doctrine. If you don’t get that, if you think you can blithely dismiss jihadism as “cowardice” and thus avoid the unpleasant burden of understanding why it happens, you are never going to get what we’re up against. You are never going to summon the resolve it is going to take to overcome the enemy.

Because we don’t believe in much of anything anymore, we discount the pull of ideology. But everything about this enemy, from the pecking order of its leaders to its ruthless methods, from the targets it chooses to the ends it seeks, is all about ideology — fiercely held by its adherents because it is scripturally based. If we don’t face up to the fact that ideology is the core of the challenge we face — that we do not have the luxury of ignoring ideology until after it catalyzes murderous action — we cannot defend ourselves.