Of victimhood and victory

David Warren writes about the 21 Coptic Christians beheaded yesterday by Islamic State :

I believe these Copts, like many hundreds before them in the last few years mostly in Egypt itself, were genuine martyrs. They were slain in the knowledge that they could escape their fate by publicly converting to Islam. Of twenty-one captives, it appears twenty-one refused. It is the more remarkable that even little Christian boys captured by the Jihadis in Iraq refused to deny Christ, directly in sight of the butchery that awaited them. Take that in, O we of little faith, in our fey and emasculated culture. This is an aspect of the case that Western journalists overlook — often do not even bother to report — because they find anything but cowardice incomprehensible.

In the strange, perverted world of Obama, “multiculturalism” specifies that there are no differences between creeds, that one is always as good as another, or as bad as another should the rhetorical moment demand. This vicious doctrine is at the root of all “political correctness,” and liberals who have wormed into positions of power in the modern State are constantly looking for ways to enforce it. Christians and Muslims are not interchangeable; indeed, no two men are interchangeable, no two groups of anything are the same.

Throughout the Western philosophical heritage, we have been taught to identify, in justice, with the innocent victim. We have also been taught to eschew vengeance, whether on his behalf or our own: for as the entire Judaeo-Christian tradition affirms, vengeance belongs to God, only.

Self-defence is another matter. We are entirely within the right to defeat the unjustly violent, even to hunt down the Jihadis to the last man, if that is what victory requires.