Justifying Murder 101

Take a look at this extremly short article, US carried out madrasah bombing (Times Online). It gives us the following information:

“The bombing of a Pakistani madrasah last month, in which 82 students were killed, was carried out by the United States.”

Initial reaction? Horror, of course. Or the numbed ghost of an emotion that passes for horror, when hearing of the murder of dozens of people you don’t know, from another culture, at extreme remove. An intellectual horror, if you will, if not necessarily a visceral one.

Of secondary reactions there are many. If you’re of the opinion that the US shouldn’t be blowing up schools anywhere—least of all in countries with which we are ostensibly allied—you might move on to disgust and write a letter to your representative in Washington. Others, with more flexible morals, will read further, seeking information that will justify this attack and affix the US more firmly into its role as a weary but determined defender of all that is right and good against the blackest forces of evil, whose minions may be hiding in every shadowy crevice of the world and only one of whom is capable of doing untold damage to a world that would otherwise shine with the light and purity, ruled with free markets and benevolence by the chosen people of America.

If you’re the second kind, even an article this short manages to pack in enough justification for you to go on with your day, smiling and secure in the knowledge that America is making the world safe for you.

Within this admittedly short and information-scant article, there are enough crumbs for a staunch defender of the American way—as defined this week—to be able to easily subsume this bombing of a school without questioning the bombers’ right to bomb. The school was a madrasah[1], which is a very, very strict school that deals only with Islamic teaching. They are thought to be indoctrination centers for Muslim terrorists. The American public has had it drilled into its head that it is, in fact, the case that every single madrasah exists only to churn out mindless warriors whose only remaining goal in life is to wipe out as many Americans as possible on their way to their 72 virgins. Since the people attending these schools are foreign in almost every possible way to the people that the average American sees every day, it makes it ever so much easier to believe.

Knowing that, it’s not only not bad to blow up this school, but a regrettable—and only insofar that the US doesn’t like killing any human being, as we all know—act that snuffed out 82 known terrorists and saved untold American lives. At best, you may have a broad pity for the brainwashed students, who clearly didn’t know any better, but a pity mitigated by the knowledge that they were no less personally dangerous to you for all that.

Other facts concealed within this tiny article are the claims of the eminently untrustworthy “[l]ocal people, [who] claimed the victims included boys as young as 12”. These locals are all also very suspcious, living in such close proximity to a terrorist training camp and so far from a Starbucks. They are likely all terrorists who would love to slit the throat of an American if they only could. Therefore, they lie.

For the novice, who may not have been able to follow the more subtle justification for murder implied by the use of the word “madrasah”, there is the final sentence, which spells out in no uncertain terms that this school—which dodgy, and swarthy, locals swear only teaches Islam—had to go:

“Pakistani officials insist they were shown satellite images of people training and have checked the identity cards of all those killed, and that all were adults.”

Ah, well, that’s all right then. They were shown photographs. By the US military. Kind of like the ones Colin Powell paraded before the UN, indicating exact locations of chemical weapons factories that turned out to be weather stations? Kind of like those, you mean? That’s very nice, because the Pakistanis are covering their asses by saying the US justified the rocket attack on a school with proof. Well, no shit. Proof we got. Anybody with photoshop and an afternoon has got proof.

And so, with all that, this short article, has managed to break the news that the US killed 82 teachers and students in an attack on a school in Pakistan, but at the same time provided enough justification so that most Americans will see this as a good thing and just another weary step in our plod to victory in the war on terror. You know, the war where everyone else is trying to kill us.

Not believing that all madrasahs are terrorist training camps in no way justifies what they actually are: the really strict ones forsake reality-based teaching for purely religious study, creating minds ripe for manipulation. The US should work to ensure that such indoctrination centers provide a more balanced education, but not by blowing them up! If that’s the solution for bad education, the kids of America should be happy that they only got shafted by the No Child Left Behind act instead of just being wiped off the face of the earth. Hell, it’s not like the US doesn’t have its own indoctrination centers; maybe somebody should lob a missile into Jesus Camp (IMDB).