Posted on 10/28/2001 7:53:57 AM PST by chuck allen
Americans love life, risk death
Are there specific pictures and words from the last six weeks which keep coming back to your mind, over and over again?
Perhaps the pictures that haunt us all are the same ones. But what about words? Are there any you can't get out of your head?
For me, it is a phrase from a television statement by the chief lieutenant of terrorist Osama bin Laden. In the course of a rambling and vitriolic diatribe, he said: ''... Another thing you must remember, we have thousands of men who look forward to death the way Americans look forward to life...''
In that one phrase, he told us considerably more than he knew he was telling us. He told us all we needed to know about himself and his movement.
Of course, his group has followers who look forward to death. Their system has given them nothing else to look forward to. Death is, after all, not so far removed from the empty lives they live and the barren hopes they hold.
Death is all around them. Disease, hunger, infant mortality, sickness are the daily realities of their existence. But instead of attacking these evils, they lash out at those who are doing so successfully, then demonize the success.
They use a perversion of their religion and they use out-of-context phrases from their holy book to justify murdering innocent men, women and babies.
Of course these terrorists and the ones they convert to their cult of murder look forward to death. The coin of their realm is despair. Instead of doing everything they can to make the lives of their people better, they preach the doctrine that the only way to make life better is to die.
Some message.
No society on earth has escaped trying times, the times of sickness and ignorance and want. Often the periods of time encompassed centuries. But those societies all battled the darkness around them day by day, inch by inch, striving to make life better for their families and their communities. If there were people who were better off, they tried to learn from them, not destroy them.
That man who was looking at us through the television screen, spewing his hatred, could not have stated the case more clearly.
The terrorists are on the side of death. America is on the side of life.
It is not - as some of the terrorists would have the world believe - that Americans do not believe in a hereafter. If statistics are correct, most of us do. The basic difference is that Americans believe the best preparation for the next world is helping people in this one, not killing them.
''... Thousands who look forward to death the way Americans look forward to life ...'' What a bankrupt mission the terrorists embrace.
There are some, including many in our government, who believe taped statements from the terrorists should not be shown on American television. I disagree. When they speak, the terrorists expose themselves to the world for what they are: egocentric, amoral, ignorant, cruel megalomaniacs.
Sixty years ago, when Americans saw those same qualities in our newsreels of Hitler and Mussolini, we knew them for what they were. The same is now true of bin Laden and his toadies.
If this small band of sociopaths truly look forward to death, they have come to the right people. The history of the last 100 years shows that the United States of America is unsurpassed in dealing death to those who would turn the world back to the dark ages of atrocity and repression.
Yes, Americans love life. The life of family, community, friends, God, nation. They love it so much they will risk death to defend it.
The enemy loves death so much it dares not risk life, with its complexities, changes, uncertainties. In the real world, bin Laden offers only a coward's creed.
Here's to life.
Nick Clooney writes for The Post every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Publication date: 10-22-01
Well, looks like we need to be giving them what they look forward to.
I grew up in Lexington, KY and remember Nick Clooney on radio and TV. I'm surprised he writes a column.
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