Limiting the Human Imagination

From a seemingly unending pool of young people, mostly teenagers, Palestinians recruit their suicide bombers. Unlike the West, which sees the young as their country's future, terrorist consider their youth expendable in pursuit of Jihad and/or the destruction of everything Jewish and Western. Over 50% of their population is under the age of 25 and deprived of education, sex life, smoking; everything is considered harmful. All of them are made to believe that being a martyr is the biggest thing to happen, and they're given fantastic funerals. It is like the ultimate high for a person in that kind of environment."

To die of disease, age, accident or even in combat is a condition of the human destiny. But to choose the moment of your own death and take other lives because you believe an idea is bigger than yourself: What ideology could justify that? At least in battle you hope to survive.

To me, consciousness is the all-encompassing idea; without it, there are no ideas, and to destroy it is to destroy all ideas. A movement that encourages suicide so that it can benefit from the annihilation of a human being is monstrously selfish: Let bin Laden or al-Zawahiri blow them selves up—if they feel someone must.

It strikes me as sad that the human imagination could be so limited that it sees its own extinction as a victory.