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The
Multiple Tragedy of Evil Regimes
By Angelo Codevilla,
Director, Division for Research in Strategy
On December 7, The New York Times
published a revealing story by Joel Greenberg, "A
Family Is Left 'Sad And Happy' By A Violent
death," but failed to draw the obvious
conclusions.
The story is about Daoud Abu Sway, a 46-year-old
father of eight who blew himself up to kill Israelis.
The story is mostly conventional, about how his family
both mourns him and is proud of him. Unlike other
similar stories however, this one gives an instructive
glimpse of the practical circumstances in which an
ordinary person became a murderous suicide. By all
accounts, Daoud Abu Sway was very ordinary - a
hard-working, responsible, devout family man, neither
a religious nor a political fanatic. His picture in
the Times, unlike that of, say, Mohammed Atta, does
not show the face of a terrorist.
What then made him do it? The story does not say. It
does mention, however, that he had been unemployed for
a year since the Intifada shut down access to his job
in Israel, and had been depressed about his inability
to provide for his family. But every family man who
has ever been unemployed calculates how much better
off his family would be if they could collect on his
insurance policy. Then Greenberg writes: "It
seems in recent weeks Mr. Abu Sway seemed positively
buoyant, his wife said, showering his children with
extra money to buy what they wanted in the local
grocery store." Greenberg's description of the
family suggests that it was no longer in dire
financial straits.
The implication is obvious: somebody offered this
dutiful, straitened man an insurance policy. The
policy provided both money and social status for his
family that he could not give while alive. The
pittances he got before his death he used for the
satisfaction of watching his family eat.
Terrorism perpetrated by an apparently decent person
for arguably decent motives, unlike the terrorism
perpetrated by horrid people for horrid motives, is a
multiple tragedy. The persons responsible for turning
such man into a suicide/murderer are in the category
of Shakespeare's Iago, who turned the brave and
righteous (but none too swift) Othello into a
murderer/suicide. The worst of villains, they deserve
death by the worst of tortures. Shakespeare tells us
that about Iago.
Who are these culprits? They are the people in the
Muslim world with the money to make such payments to
men like Daoud Abu Sway, and with the social position
to grant prestige to their families. And what is the
dictionary term that describes the people in any place
who have the power to grant social prestige and money?
It is "regime." Every place has persons who
hold the gates to prosperity and prominence, who
define what is respectable and out of bounds. The
Muslim world is cursed with regimes that bring out the
worst in people.
The Muslim world's criminal regimes are the proper
target, indeed the only reasonable target for
Americans who want to stop terrorism. These regimes
are the factories that produce terrorism. It is all
the more important for the West to destroy these
regimes because the West has done so much to establish
them and prop them up. Where does anyone think that
the money to transform the likes of Daoud Abu Sway
into a terrorist came from?
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