¤ milky moon ¤

When it was over, a further eight security personnel lay dead in and around the church along with all six Islamists.

The group that claimed responsibility for the savage violence, The Islamic State of Iraq, is an al Qaeda affiliate. The affiliation is the tragedy’s least surprising aspect, since wherever there is the smell of innocent, murdered corpses, al Qaeda can’t be far away.

In their statement issued after the attack, the terrorist group blamed their act of mass murder and destruction on Egypt’s Coptic Church for allegedly holding two women who had converted to Islam. Their other spurious excuse concerned the martyred Baghdad church itself. In the statement, it was called “…one of the filthy dens of idolatry that was always used by the Christians of Iraq to fight the religion of Islam and to support those who fight that religion.”

But the real reason for Sunday’s hellish bloodletting is that Islamist terrorists, as has often been noted, are death worshippers. Several have been quoted as saying that while we (in the West) love life, they love death. Former President George Bush even referred to one of these nihilistic messages in a speech he made in 2004, calling Islamist thinking “a mindset that rejoices in suicide, incites murder and celebrates every death we mourn.” Bush could have been speaking of the Iraqi church massacre.

Some believe this love of death was present even in Islam’s earliest days, such as in the message Caliph Abu Bakr sent to a Persian commander before a battle in 636 bears. It read: You should convert to Islam, and then you will be safe, for if you don’t, you should know that I have come to you with an army of men that love death as you love life.”
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In Beslan, Geifman believes the terrorists took “their sacrificial destruction to a new level.” By attacking a town like Beslan where everyone knew each other, all suffered death and bereavement, even if they didn’t lose a child. This in turn has created what psychologists call a “death space” or “zone” where everyone is grieving. But unlike Holocaust survivors who were also “affected for life”, the people of Beslan remain in their town among their dead. Since the tragedy, the locals call their town a “closed ‘infected sphere’ ” where it is like “living in a cemetery.” (Islamist “Dead Zones”)