Tomorrow, he will kill. Tomorrow, he will regain his honor
The Murderer’s Honor
- Daniel Greenfield (
Bio and Archives)
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
The story of Islam is a murder mystery. It’s not the kind of murder
mystery where you wonder who did it, but when it will end. The detective
peering with his magnifying glass at a scrap of fiber left behind on
the carpet or a curly piece of hair caught in the door isn’t really
trying to sort out who did it. He knows who did it. The great mystery
that consumes him is how to make the killer stop.
This isn’t a story about right and wrong.
Right and wrong aren’t serious propositions in the arid deserts where
the murderer comes from. Right is power. Wrong is not having power. A
man is right because he has power. A woman is wrong because she doesn’t.
A Muslim is right because he has power. A Christian is wrong because he
doesn’t.
When a woman has power and a man doesn’t, then the man has been
dishonored. When a Christian has power and a Muslim doesn’t, then the
Muslim has been dishonored. There is only one answer for dishonor,
death. Kill the one who has dishonored you so that you can feel powerful
again. The men with the magnifying glasses will call it extremism, but
it’s much simpler and much more complicated than that.
The powerful need not compromise. They have honor. Those who have no
power but do not compromise also have honor. The extremist does not
compromise whether in power or out of it. Therefore he always has honor.
The extremist is willing to die for the power and honor of Islam.
Islam is never powerless, but is always
compromised in some way short of perfect purity. Perhaps it fails to
drive out all the non-Muslims and doesn’t force women to cover their
eyes. Or maybe it tolerates chess and kite flying. Even the crudest
Salafist finds some human norm short of total and complete extremism. He
compromises and the seed of that compromise gives birth to a movement
that will not compromise even on that. Each Islamic movement carries
within it the seeds of its own extremist counter-movement and that
movement too will carry its own seeds of death. The Islamic revolution
devours its own children forever for honor’s sake.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Absolute honor is the search for
absolute power. A power so pure that it transcends the human means
necessary to achieve that glorious end. A purity so total that it will
elevate the smuggled cocaine, the rapes and murders, the torture and the
broken oaths to the golden truth that the ends of Islam justify all its
mangled means.
The murderer kills because he wants power. He goes on killing for
honor’s sake. When the blade slips or the victim pulls a gun, then the
murderer skulks off into the night nursing his grudges and pledging that
he will return or his children will return or their children, on and on
through the ages.
All this may have started because the murderer wanted a goat, a gold
coin or a wife, but it continues because it is now a matter of honor. A
moment ago the murderer only wanted a gold coin, but having failed to
obtain it, it is now a matter that will not leave off for all the gold
coins in the world. Murder transmutes the gold coin into honor. The
motive no longer matters. It is all about the end now.
The more the murderer is resisted, the angrier he becomes. The
failure to kill forces him to take refuge in myth. He begins inventing
glorious stories of his battles complete with poems and epic battles.
There are sacred deaths with drops of blood falling like jewels and
doves ascending into the sky. Every man becomes a lion and every enemy a
monstrous eater of children. Eventually the story becomes his whole
reason for being. It is a tale that is passed down through the tribe
until countless of the murderer’s descendants derive their identity from
the story. Until they are all murderers.
Having been thwarted, the murderer cannot stop. The failure to kill
has left him powerless, no better than a woman or an infidel. It causes
him to doubt the worth of his religion and his people. It robs life of
its sweetness. The only way to heal his trauma is to finish what he
started. The only way for him to be at peace is to be at war.
Speak to him of peace and he will not listen, except as a ploy for
finishing the unfinished murder. Peace is for the powerless. To desire
peace is to admit to weakness. It is to give in to the prosaic mortality
of the ordinary life. Before he began to kill, the murderer might have
been satisfied with the ordinary life, but it is no longer good enough
for him. Nothing will do but the knife and the blood and the screams.
The murderer will lie about wanting peace, but he will not make peace
The murderer will lie about wanting peace, but he will not make
peace. To lie in order to kill is honorable, but to live in peace is not
honorable. Peace narrows the borders and closes off horizons. What was
once a green territory that the grandchildren or great-grandchildren
might overrun in a hundred years is suddenly forever lost and forever
foreign. How can he be asked to make such a terrible concession?
You might as well ask the sailor to stay on the land and the explorer
to put up his feet in front of the fire. The murderer isn’t a mere
murderer, he is a romantic at heart, and whether he lives in a mud hut
or a tacky palace decorated with giant portraits of himself, in secret
he imagines himself a sultan or an emir. And if not him, then his
children or grandchildren.
The land he sits on is merely land, he wastes it for the most part
for what good is it to him. He may write poems about the beloved land,
but it isn’t the land he loves, but the idea of conquering it, killing
for it and dying for it. And when there is no need to do any of the
three, then like an amorous adulterer of the soil he goes seeking for
other lands to conquer, to kill and die for.
This is his story and the myth that governs his life. He is not a
builder. In his part of the world, it is the slaves who build. It is the
men who have no power and no honor who work a set schedule, lifting
bricks and arranging girders. Nor is he a farmer, that too is work fit
only for serfs. He makes a decent merchant, cheating and being cheated
in turn in a ritual mercantile combat. In a pinch he might be a
shepherd, wandering the hills aimlessly, and watching his flock nibble
the sparse desert grasses down to a wasteland, killing and eating them
when it suits him like a little grubby god.
Whatever his profession, he fancies himself a warrior and the kind of
war that he prefers is the raid. Village against village. Riders
against caravans. Hijacked planes against skyscrapers. If he wins, then
he gains honor. If he loses then he gains honor by vowing vengeance, for
even the worst of losers can always hang on to his honor by threatening
to kill the winners.
And that is where the murders become a mystery, at least to those
detectives whose little magnifying glasses can make out the grooves on a
thread, but not the distorted rage on a murderer’s face. The more they
try to convince the murderer to stop, the more he kills. There is a
pattern here, but unlike carpet fibers and footprints, it is not one
that they can understand.
The men with the magnifying glasses want their lives back. So does
the murderer. And the only way he can get it back is by taking theirs.
The institution of the feud has lapsed in their world, but it is the
defining one in his. Both detective and murderer are trapped in a cycle,
but the murderer has a way out. All he has to do is kill them. The
detectives cannot do the same thing. There is no room in their rational
world for such a crude solution. They try to break the cycle with words.
He tries to break it with bombs and bullets. And the cycle of violence
continues.
Failure goads the murderer. The more he fails at killing, the more he
aspires to it. On his tenth attempt he is ten times as motivated as on
his first attempt. Like all people he has his ups and downs, but he
always keeps on trying harder.
Each time he fails, he tells himself that the game wasn’t fair, the
other side broke the rules, rigged the contest and undermined him. He
spins complex conspiracies of spies and saboteurs in which the mind of
the enemy is as convoluted as his, and that only fuels his outrage. How
dare his victim plot so cleverly to undermine his own murder! Outraged,
he spins his own convoluted plots, playing Wiley E. Coyote to an
oblivious Roadrunner who is occasionally baffled to learn that he is
alleged to have controlled every major public figure in the Middle East
or seeded the Nile with trained sharks.
“Sure,” says the murderer. “You didn’t expect him to admit it, did you? I wouldn’t in his place.”
In this way the murderee takes on an outsized importance until he,
she or it comes to represent every obstacle that the murderer has ever
faced in his life, every nightmare and night terror. Whatever crimes the
murderer commits, he is certain that the murderee has committed even
more of them. The murderer’s dark side steps out of the shadow and takes
on the role of his victim so that the act of murder becomes an act of
purification that purifies nothing for the dark forces that the murderer
tries to kill are still inside him even while his victim bleeds on the
floor.
Eventually the murderee fills the world. Rushdie was only a minor
writer until a series of random events caused his name to come to the
attention of a shaky Iranian leadership looking for a scapegoat. And
then Rushdie became an obsession for the Iranian regime. Rushdie filled
their world. Likewise the average Muslim did not spend any time thinking
about the Jews, who were always despised, but like most non-Muslims,
weren’t of consequence. Having conquered their lands and their persons,
they could go about ignoring them, aside from the usual thefts, murders
and assorted cruelties. But then, after making numerous compromises, the
honorless Jews, the sons of apes and pigs, defeated armies far stronger
than them. The murderers were robbed of their honor. And when the
murderer is Muslim and the victim is non-Muslim, then the honor of the
murderer is the honor of the whole Muslim world.
And there can be no peace now. Not tomorrow or in a thousand years.
Not with the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the
Galilee and the grimier parts of Tel Aviv. Nothing will do but for the
murderers to finish what they started, the aborted murder, the
unfinished crime and the unconsummated honor killing to end all honor
killings. Nothing will do but death.
A murderer will forgive many things. You may kill his son and rape
his daughter, so long as the blood price or the honor price changes
hands. You may do the same with all of his many relatives and their
relatives, as is so often the case in these dirty little wars that are
really packs of murderers roaming and raiding, firing at each other and
falling back, and then waiting for the mourning women to come out and
wail over the bodies of the dead. You may even cheat him as much as you
like, for he will probably cheat you worse, even while you fancy that
you are coming out ahead. But what you cannot do is take away his honor.
Do not mock the murderer’s gods, for they are his power, or refuse
his hospitality, for it is how he shows that he has more than you, or
make him feel small and weak. Though he may smile afterward, he will
never forgive you for it, the insult will go on chafing his heart until
it overflows with that species of black blood that tastes of bitterness
and death.
The House of Saud has never forgiven the House of Washington for
helping aid its power. It draws a blood price from it every year, but it
cannot rest until the House of Washington falls. So too all alliances
must one day end in betrayal or death. There is no room in the green
country of the horizon for two tribes to rule. Nor is there room in the
inner palaces of honor with their bejeweled tapestries and arabesque
curves for a helping hand. The Sultan and Emir, like Allah, can have no
antecedent. Like Mohammed, he must be the final revelation of power over
a powerless world.
And the murderer? He cannot sleep. The man he tried to kill has
filled his world. Once he wanted gold or goats, but now it is honor he
wants. On his bed, the murderer dreams of killing a man whose only crime
was humiliating him by refusing to die. The murderer rolls over and
smiles. Tomorrow, he will kill. Tomorrow, he will regain his honor.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City writer
and columnist. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center and his articles appears at its Front Page Magazine site.
Daniel can be reached at: sultanknish@yahoo.com
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