The jihadists, brainwashed from an early age to sacrifice their lives for an evil utopia to rise from the ashes of civilization, represent neither state nor homeland. We debate whether appeasement can win time against the terrorism, but Hoover Institution fellow Shelby Steele points out that from the modern Muslim world "comes an unappeasable hatred that seems to exist for its own sake." America and Israel remain the focus of jihadist rhetoric, but few reckon that the eradication of America and Israel would diminish the hatred that galvanizes the aspiring killers who sit at the feet of Osama bin Laden. "Even the fight of Islamic terrorist groups is oddly self-referential," Mr. Steele writes in The Wall Street Journal, "fighting not for territory or treasure but for the fighting itself."
The terrorists exhibit glee in the destruction of life and property, but they have no plans for rebuilding what they destroy, even in an image of their own. Destruction is destruction for the sake of creating rubble and ruin. The Nazis in their genocidal dreams saw killing all Jews as the "final solution," to rid the world of an enemy born in paranoid fantasies of psychological inferiority. Al Qaeda texts seized in Afghanistan in the wake of September 11 talk of suicide missions as "the Solution," an end in itself to keep the world aware of their nihilistic power. Sating an addiction to the blood of infidels is all.
The radical Muslims use the shorthand of "big Satan" and "little Satan" as useful symbols to unite political factions and sects of the Middle East cauldron. That's a lot easier than examining the distinctions and differences that divide Islam. A desire to destroy Israel and humiliate America is the powerful unifying force, "a pretense," as one critic calls it, "for a universal Jihad."
"This war will be long," says the president, "but it will end in the defeat of the terrorists and totalitarians." But only if we can summon the will to see and understand what's at stake.