Turning the Terrorists

Young men are natural-born killers. They love to fight and to kill. That is why it is young men who think up millennarian schemes and revolutions, and causes based on blood and killing.

Lee Harris has written about this persuasively in Civilization and Its Enemies. The great task of civilization, he writes, is to turn the “eternal gang of ruthless men,” the natural-born killers, into the benign and productive Western team.

In a long article in The New Yorker Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower, suggests that the terrorists of Al Qaeda are beginning to turn from terror.

Partly, of course, this is because the young firebrands of thirty years ago are now older and wiser. Partly this is because the Egyptian government has done a number on the hundreds of Islamic terrorists they have held in jail for years and years.

Partly this is because of a rivalry and jealousy between Islamist leaders Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (aka Dr. Fadl) and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Partly we are talking about a general revulsion over the killing of innocent women and children.

Then there is the shame that Egypt experiences as countries like India and China, probably poorer than Egypt a generation ago, are overtaking it and showing the bankruptcy of the terrorist program.

For what, after all, have the terrorists achieved, except to create a bloodbath and provoke the Great Satan to meddle deeper and deeper in the Middle East?

But if the terrorists are turning away from indiscriminate violence, it can be nothing but good.