Stanley Crouch: Defying Terror is the Only Answer

The New York Daily News

Prior to taping "Topic A with Tina Brown" last week, I was shown some footage of the latest decapitation by Islamic jihadists. There was talk on the set of the high production values, with the video including singing in a Middle Eastern style that was, perhaps, close enough to Western music to remain in the mind of one listening.
It seemed, some thought, that these murderous clowns are on to something, that they have learned how to create visual "product."

Apparently, they have studied MTV and other such television phenomena to learn how to put together a moment that builds up to a murder.

By the time the man was pushed flat and had his head sawed off, though, I found myself not frightened or intimidated by this "product" but filled with a combination of revulsion, gloom and fury.

These murderers are the same kind of people we see photographed and standing proudly at lynchings, happy as the day is long because the strange fruit of a Negro is hanging from a tree. Anybody who believes differently is some species of lunatic or naif or fool.

History is always a hard taskmaster.

Human beings can quite often be no more compassionate than nature, which maintains its balance through one species eating enough of another to keep things from getting out of order.

Of course, there is little compassion in nature and even less empathy.
As far as we know, human beings are the only ones who can imagine themselves outside of their bodies and even outside of their cultures to the extent that empathizing with others is possible.

I am not at all interested in empathizing, in "understanding" how America and Israel have, through warlike blunders of one sort or another, given life to the cause championed by these murderers. No atrocities, real or asserted, validate the actions of these people or dealing with them on any terms defined by them.

Xenophobia is at the root of what we are looking at when we see these beheadings or read about them. The destruction of that xenophobia - the fear of others - is what must breed civilization in our time.

There is no point in bargaining with barbarians. They can only take you into a world of black air.

We can never give in to them or let them believe that kidnapping and videotaped murder - no matter how sophisticated the production - is going to turn any nation around.

Originally published on September 27, 2004