You can’t play the “what sound does this animal make” game with little children the same way I used to play it with my kids. At least one of the sounds has changed. How does the cow go? Moo. How does the cat go? Meow. How does the mouse go? Click!

Yes, the computer mouse goes click, the switch goes click, the relay and the solenoid go click, the detonator on the explosive belt filled with nails and ball bearings to increase the carnage as much as possible goes click — and in an instant, a split second, there is death and destruction. There’s a horrible but all-too-true cartoon showing two Arab fathers talking while their children play a few yards away. One father, looking at them with obvious admiration, turns to the other father and says, “They blow up so quickly, don’t they!”

Yes, they do. Homicide bombers we ought to call them. People who commit suicide kill only themselves. These people only kill themselves so that they might cause the death of as many others as possible. I thought, as many did, that these were acts of desperation on the part of those enraged by poverty and powerlessness.

We were wrong. Many, perhaps most, are educated people, some with advanced degrees, from the middle-class or even upper-class. Many are married, with families and children:

I have a picture from the newspaper of Raed Abdul Hamid Misk, a smiling, pleasant looking man with glasses and a neatly trimmed beard. He’s wearing a plaid shirt and looks like he should soon be going off to work, perhaps as a computer programmer at some high tech company. In one arm he’s carrying his two-year-old daughter Sama, in the other, his three-year-old son Momen. He posed for that picture three days before he blew himself up on a bus in Jerusalem.

Are these people simply insane? Unfortunately, no. It would be better if they were. It is far more frightening to realize that there is an entire religious philosophy at work here. The terrorists believe that their religion requires them to force their beliefs on everyone else by any and all means possible, including mass murder. Robert Pape of the American Political Science Review examined all 188 of the world’s suicide-terrorist attacks between 1980 and 2001. He found that:

· Suicide terrorism is guided by clearly identifiable strategic goals.
· 95% of the suicide-terrorist strikes from 1980 to 2001 were undertaken as part of an organized political campaign.
· They occur in “clusters.”
· Most importantly, every suicide attack in the period under study was launched against a democracy. [Adam Wolfson, National Review Online, “Demystify It: How to defeat suicide terrorism.]

We put ourselves and our freedom in even greater danger than we are already if we do not understand that:

· Although the terrorists’ strain of Islam is clearly not shared by most Muslims… it does represent a long existent, radical fundamentalist part of Islam that cannot be ignored or denied.
· Islam’s religious tolerance has always been predicated on its own power. When it lost territory and saw itself eclipsed by the West, that tolerance evaporated.
· “For true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of the holy law and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith.” [Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis, cited in “This is a Religious War” by Andrew Sullivan, 10/7/01.]
· What they believe to be truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. [Lewis]

Where do these ideas come from? Largely from a man named Sayyid Qutb [KUH-tahb]. He was an Egyptian Islamist: someone who was virulently opposed to a modern, secularist state, and who wanted to impose his religious ideals on everyone, by force if necessary. Born in 1906, he was jailed by Gamal Abdel Nasser for his radical Islamist politics and tortured for much of the last ten years of his life. While in prison, he wrote a monumental work of fundamentalist philosophy. He was hanged in 1966. His brother, Muhammad, fled and ended up as a distinguished professor of Islamic Studies in Saudi Arabia. One of his students was Osama bin Laden.

The magnum opus Sayyid Qutb wrote in his jail cell is called “In the Shade of the Qur’an” and will run to some 15 volumes when its English translation is finished. For the Islamic terrorists, the Islamists, this masterwork, perhaps one of the most astonishing pieces of prison literature ever created, is their Bible, Constitution, Mein Kampf, and Communist Manifesto all rolled into one. [Paul Berman, “New York Times Sunday Magazine Section” March 23, 2003.]

Qutb’s picture is on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine Section of March 23, 2003. It shows a fairly young man in a jacket and tie, with a small, neatly trimmed mustache. Anyone I’ve shown it to and asked who the man in the photograph is, has immediately responded: Adolph Hitler.

His world-view is indeed Hitlerian in its totalitarianism Qutb gave voice to a radical Islamist philosophy that has been gathering strength for the last 200 years. He, Osama Bin Laden, Qutb, and the other Islamists believe that,

… all over the world, humans had reached a moment of unbearable crisis. The human race had lost touch with human nature… Man was miserable, anxious and skeptical, sinking into idiocy, insanity and crime. [Pg. 27] Qutb worried that people with liberal ideas were mounting a gigantic campaign against Islam - “an effort to confine Islam to the emotional and ritual circles, and to bar it from participating in the activity of life, and to check its complete predominance over every human secular activity, a pre-eminence it earns by virtue of its nature and function.” [Pg. 56]

He worried, then, about the separation of Church and State. He worried about freedom. He violently opposed both.

Although the Islamists may not have read the section in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov called “The Grand Inquisitor”, it sums up the core of their philosophy better than anything else I have seen:

In the story told by Ivan Karamazov, Jesus returns to earth during the Spanish Inquisition. On a day when hundreds have been burned at the stake for heresy, Jesus performs miracles. Alarmed, the Inquisitor arrests Jesus and imprisons him with the intent of burning him at the stake as well… According to the Inquisitor, Jesus revealed that salvation – eternal life in Paradise as the reward for obedience to God in this life – was possible. His crime, said the Inquisitor, was allowing humans the freedom to refuse it.

And this, to the Inquisitor, was a form of cruelty. When the truth involves the most important things imaginable -- the meaning of life, the fate of one’s eternal soul, the difference between good and evil -- it is not enough to premise it on the capacity of human choice. That is too great a burden… What human beings really need is the certainty of truth, and they need to see it reflected in everything around them… a seamless fabric of faith that helps them resist the terror of choice and the abyss of unbelief.

That “seamless fabric of faith” is fundamentalism, a force we cannot simply dismiss as primitive or misguided. It is immensely powerful:

We may disagree with it, but it has attracted millions of adherents for centuries, and for good reason. It elevates and comforts. It provides a sense of meaning and direction to those lost in a disorienting world. The blind recourse to texts embraced as literal truth, the injunction to follow the commandments of God before anything else, the subjugation of reason and judgment and even conscience to the dictates of dogma, these can be exhilarating and transformative. They have led human beings to perform extraordinary acts of both good and evil.

And they have an internal logic to them. If you believe that there is an eternal afterlife and that endless, indescribable torture awaits those who disobey God’s law, then it requires no huge stretch of the imagination to make sure that you not only conform but that you also encourage and, if necessary, coerce others to do the same. [Sullivan]

Within the context of this logic the Islamists believe that only a fundamentalist Muslim society should be allowed to exist anywhere on earth. How is this new Islamic theocracy going to be created? By means of jihad, the struggle for Islam. Some more liberal Muslims see the struggle as internal, a personal attempt to live up to the ideals of the Qur’an. For the Islamists is an external one that takes place in the external world, and often leads to death:

In 1998, Sheik Ekrima Sabri, the leading Muslim official in Palestinian-controlled Jerusalem, told New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Goldberg that the Jews’ great weakness is that they embrace life, while “the Muslim embraces death.... Look at the society of the Israelis. It is a selfish society that loves life. These are not people who are eager to die for their country and their God. The Jews will leave this land rather than die, but the Muslim is happy to die.” [Dennis Rushkoff, “Nothing Sacred”, pg. 197.]

Qutb thinks he should be, and speaks often and at great length about martyrdom. Those who give their lives for God, those who are happy to die for Allah are pure, noble, blessed. They need not fear death. Their influence, their actions live on after them, and so they are not really dead. He believes that the lifeless body is only a superficial remnant of a life that remains active in the world. Qutb and his followers take this literally. He refused to leave Egypt when he had the chance, knowing full well that he was going to be killed. That, he thought, would be the source of his greatest influence. Unfortunately, he was right.

Fundamentalism as a matter of faith is to be respected. But when it is coupled with political power, its potential for evil is monumental. A friend of mine who is a Catholic priest told me that in his opinion the greatest tragedy that ever befell Christianity – a tragedy that still continues -- was when its religious teachings were coupled with the political might of the Roman Empire.

I agree. I also agree with those who saw both Nazism and Communism as forms of fundamentalism that attempted to impose their world-view on the rest of the world. People of good will and courage fought them, and they failed. They were, as President Bush said, “discarded lies.” But, says writer Andrew Sullivan,

They [Nazism and Communism] were fundamentalisms built on the very weak intellectual conceits of a master race and a Communist revolution. But Islamic fundamentalism is based on a glorious civilization and a great faith. It can harness and co-opt and corrupt true and good believers if it has a propitious and toxic enough environment. It has a more powerful logic than either Stalin’s or Hitler’s Godless ideology, and it can serve as a focal point for all the other societies in the world, whose resentment of Western success and civilization comes more easily than the arduous task of accommodation to modernity.

The words we speak over and over again during these High Holydays, “Choose life!” are just a tiny piece of our glorious faith and ongoing tradition. Sadly, in the face of Islamist fundamentalism, they are merely the opening volley in what will be a long and protracted war.

Make no mistake about it. We are at war. The attack on the World Trade Center is this generation’s Pearl Harbor.

This surely is a religious war -- but not of Islam versus Christianity and Judaism. Rather, it is a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at peace with freedom and modernity. In bin Laden’s words, this is a religious war against ‘‘unbelief and unbelievers.’’ [Sullivan]

Our government and others are, hopefully, doing what they can to support liberalizing tendencies within the Muslim world and to create new ones. These are, unfortunately, few and far between. Liberal Muslims everywhere have thus far had little success dealing with their fanatics. The roots of September 11 run far wider and deeper than anyone in the West , and many in the East, realized. This war is going to last a long time. I am afraid with a fear the chills me deep in my bones that against all that we wish for and all that we pray for, we may be forced to give Qutb’s followers the death they say they want.

To stop them one at a time is extraordinarily difficult. To stop them all Robert Pape believes, and I think he’s right, we must sever their religious goals from all political power. If we can make their political goals untenable, then much of the impetus for homicide bombings will cease.

I pray that that instead of guns and checkpoints and metal detectors and homeland security, free choice will prevail. I pray that words and ideas and arguments for a liberal world in which people are free to practice their own religion, but not free to impose it on others, will prevail. I pray that an understanding of the crucial importance of never allowing the religious and the political realms to contaminate each other, will prevail. I pray that we will have the courage and the wisdom to teach those who “embrace death” and who are “happy to die,” to instead choose life.

Deeply rooted in my faith as a Jew, I firmly believe that evil will not win, and that freedom and goodness will prevail. Just as the anthem of Israel, our ancestral homeland, is HaTikvah, The Hope, I have hope and urge you to have it, too. Have faith that we will win this war, however long it takes.

There is a report of an interview with the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet. He was asked, “When you look at the depressing conditions found all over the world, and the injustices that happen to people everywhere, how can you be optimistic?” The Dalai Lama let out a deep, loud belly laugh, and then he replied:
“What else would you suggest?” [Rabbi Michael R. Zedek, The American Rabbi, Summer 1998, page 71.]