May 6, 2002  

Dr. Sadeq's Answer
By Robert J. Loewenberg, IASPS President

MEMRI is one of several analysis and translation services about the Mideast. In this present translation of two separate utterances, from a newspaper and the Iqraa TV channel, a Dr. Sadeq calls President Bush "you stupid idiot, you basest man in the world."  Our president does not see that "Sharon is a criminal murderer..." while Dr. Sadeq who speaks  "as a professional psychiatrist" clearly sees "the height of bliss."  It is what comes of a non-criminal murder which is that of one's self in order to kill (but not to murder) others; Jews.

As a scholar or student of what is least accessible to sensible experience, this Egyptian psychiatrist tells us that when a person "dies a martyr's death" he achieves certitude about life. It all "comes with the end of the countdown....[when] you press the button to blow yourself up. When the martyr reaches 'one,' and then 'boom,' he explodes, and senses himself flying, ...he knows for certain that he is not dead....It is a transition to another, more beautiful world." How can a human being know for certain that he is alive when he is dead and his self has been blown to bits by him"self" when "certainty" about death is the very thing men never have had? But this psychiatrist says he has this certainty -when he is still alive as a self in the normal way. What is the meaning of this puzzle? Should we dismiss the doctor as a terrorist in speech?

It would not be much of a task to hold this individual up to ridicule or to opprobrium, as it were the verbal form of terror and the wish to destroy. The savagery is certainly there, and the hatred, especially of limits. But others will do this. It's not important. Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss this commentary as only venom and wild shrieking. Beneath it all there is coherence and clarity. It's much worth understanding.

First of all, in glorifying self-murder and the murder of people, especially of every single Jew by Arab Palestinians, "as long as there is even a single Palestinian left,"  it's plain we are not listening to a non-Western man. For in fact in describing the highest bliss, brought about by the highest possible murder which is that of a single Arab self, we are being told why every single Jew must be killed (not murdered). The Jews are the people of ego or selves. The Arabs are the people of life; who "die...so that others would live." Other Arabs. That is, it tells us the answer to the question which is asked by people in the West or "why do they hate us."

The answer is simplicity itself. They hate us because we are alive. Moreover, this hate of us is justified in self-murder, "those who sacrifice their souls." How is this? Someone, "an individual who loves life" is alone capable of the highest bliss that comes from self-murder in killing Jews for whom such "concepts do not exist." There is no contradiction here. Dr. Sadeq understands this all "may seem strange to people who see the human soul as most sublime." It is most sublime only when certitude is more sublime. Certitude is what comes who one goes "'boom,'...explodes and senses himself flying, because he knows for certain that he is not dead." In sum only "those who sacrifice their souls" have certitude about death.

Dr. Sadeq's comments are not incoherent or illogical and surely they are not immoral where morality means how one should live with respect to the most important aims of existence: one's self and society. If Arabs are assured of a certitude about being alive only when they are dead in an act of suicide bombing, or which is to say that being in existence as a person and with respect to other persons or society comes about in self-murder (un-selfishness as brought about by the sacrifice of one's own soul for the society which exists to itself bring about this larger truth for every other "self"), then Dr. Sadeq is a soul doctor indeed.

What seems gibberish or close to it is a primitive or raw presentation of Nihilism. But this is what prompts the West's political intellectuals to ask: Why do they hate us? Islamic terrorist societies and culture is an experience of existence as certitude by way of murder of the self. Communism. Nazism. And the ism that stands between these two as a point stands between a line.

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