Denying the Islamic motive for terror

Daniel Greenfield writes today,

Federal law enforcement was repeatedly warned by the Russians that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was dangerous, but operating under the influence of a political culture that refused to see Islam as a motive for terrorism, it failed to connect the dots between Chechen violence in Russia and potential terrorism in the United States, and because it could not see Islam as a motive, as a causal factor rather than a casual factor, it could find no reason why Tamerlan was a threat not just to Russia, but also to the United States.

Crime is personal. War is impersonal. The murderer has personal motives for his actions, but the motives of the soldier are irrelevant. In war, it is the organization that matters more than the individual. Wasting time predicting the movements of individual soldiers instead of armies is not productive. Attempting to understand terrorists as individuals, rather than members of a mass movement is equally a waste of time.

Islamic terrorism is a collective motive. There is limited variation in the tactics and the thinking of terrorists. Whatever they may have been before they fully committed themselves to the war against civilization is an incidental matter. And the only piece of individual identity that matters is still the collective one of their Islamic background. That is still the greatest predictive factor of terrorism.

The Islamic terrorist abandons his individuality and takes on an identity that asks him to love death more than life. His motives are no longer personal, but collective. He is a soldier in the Islamic war against civilization. His marching orders may come from Jihadi videos and magazines, but they provide him with training and an esprit de corps sufficient to the purposes of his campaign of terror. To strive to understand him as a father or a son, as a boxer or a doctor, is a waste of time. These biographical footnotes no longer represent him. They are the things he has discarded to become a messenger of death in obedience to a faith that values death more than life.