Life is cheap, if it's not yours

I saw a report on the news a few days ago that included clips of Saturday-morning-type cartoons shown in Iran. The cartoons featured heroic Muslim boys and girls strapping bombs to their bodies and diving onto truck driven by horrified Israelis. Then the bloody animated carnage was shown with a voice-over praising the young martyrs.

This attitude toward glorious death is something new, relatively; the Spartans may have approached this, but I doubt it. The point of war for millenia has been to make the "other poor bastard die for his country" (George Patton). The presumption here is that the other "poor bastard" doesn't really want to die. But now a whole generation of Muslim children has grown up being taught is a good thing, perhaps the best thing, if you can die and take a few westerners with you. There is no political or military answer to this. If you make these poor bastards die for their ideology, you're doing them a favor. Then a new bunch of kids grows up to take their place — not an army, but just enough in any given time or place to create havoc — taught by a bunch of cynical manipulators safely tucked inside their mosques who think they're serving God.

So what then? Be a prayer warrior. Don't pray for peace, pray for the Prince of peace.