So claim militant Muslims, and delude themselves into believing that this assures them of victory.
But as Patton said, a good soldier doesn't die for his country, he makes the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. In the first world war, the British wouldn't give their pilots parachutes, because they thought that this would cause them to waste a plane too easily. The result was that the Germans boasted most of the legendary aces, because they were the ones who fought and lived to learn from it. Today the man is considered the most important component of any weapons system. You can rebuild a tank, a plane, a chopper, but a trained veteran soldier or pilot is another matter.
A man who goes seeking death is going to die in his first battle. There are no veteran suicide bombers. The vast majority never get anywhere near their targets, because they're green amateurs. Suicidal terrorists do make logistics easier--there's no concern about getting the man out after the mission. But the chances of success are minimal. 9/11 worked because the people involved exploited the freedoms of an open society to attack non-combatants. As soon as the planes hit the World Trade Center, the tactic became obsolete, as the hijackers of flight 93 discovered. Because the flight was delayed, the passengers had enough time to find out what was really going on. Previously, it had always been sound policy to allow the hijackers to land the plane before taking it back. Once they knew the plane was never going to land, the passengers took matters into their own hands, as all passengers will from now on. The hijackers couldn't even handle a few unarmed civilians.
Too many people take the terrorists willingness to die as a sign of courage. But the courage to die means nothing in the absence of the courage to live. These people have so little going for them that they are willing to throw whatever they have away for a fantasy of an afterlife in paradise. Their sacrifice is an act of despair, the tantrum of a child who is ignored and irrelevant. Only the pure happenstance of middle eastern oil makes these people at all significant; without the oil money, they would have nothing to support these tantrums. We have a word for people like this: losers.
To make matters worse, the goal of these extremists is to maneuver moderates and innocent civilians into the line of fire, by hiding amongst them and thereby making them targets. The intention of extremists is to make these bystanders pick sides; indeed, to give them no choice, and to attack those who pick the other side. But no terrorist movement has ever won. The best they can hope for is a cease fire, leaving the possibility of negotiated co-existence when tempers have cooled. But that is not an option for the like of Hezbolla and Al Qaeda, whose very existence is predicated upon open hostility. It is precisely when peace becomes a possibility that they become the most militant--peace would make them irrelevant. And this will never stop. The destruction of Israel would be merely a step along the road. If Israel were gone, they would go after America, and Europe, and if all opponents were gone, they would turn on each other. Jihad is their entire purpose, and so the Jihad will never end. Victory is not their goal, it is their nemesis.
Given this choice--indeed, having this choice forced upon them--it should be clear how moderates must choose. The extremists are a cult of death. To side with them is to accept death, sooner or later. Furthermore, as I have already pointed out, these extremists are lousy soldiers. All of the middle east seems to stand against Israel, and yet tiny Israel always wins. In the war of attrition that fanatical opponents wage, Israel always wins by decimating the opposition with few losses of its own. To side with the fanatics is to resign oneself to becoming a statistic in a war that never seems to end but is never won.
Israel, of course, has its own fanatics, who keep leaping at the bait that Muslim extremists offer up. But given the sheer amount of bait, it would be hard not to, although the ill-considered ravings of hard-core zionists are gift wrapped recruitment material for the other side. Leftists who rant and storm about the evils of Israel without so much as mentioning the attrocities of the likes of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad are oblivious to the real motivations of these groups. Islamic terrorists don't want justice, they want the annihilation, not just of Israel, but of the Jews--and ultimately of the entire west, including those deluded leftists. Those who carry signs with slogans like "We are all Hezbollah!" are drooling idiots. Somehow, people on the left have taken up the cause of fascists--which means, in fact, that they are no longer on the left at all. Somehow, they have sleepwalked into the company of the SS. But then, both the left and the right have been dumbed down so much that neither side remembers what it stands for.
