In February 2002, after witnessing the horrific videotaped slaughter of Daniel Pearl, I wrote this:

Danny Pearl’s death did have a purpose.

It had a purpose to the killers. He was chosen because he worked for a high-profile American newspaper, and because he was Jewish. They videotaped the murder for a reason, and I’m sure their fellow Islamo-creeps are already trading copies. It’s a training video. It’s a recruitment tool. We’ve discovered others like it in Afghanistan’s terror camps; videos of people being shot or beheaded, their bodies desecrated. It’s inaccurate to say that the murder of Danny Pearl discredits their cause. As appalling as it may be, I’m afraid it actually advances their cause, among the dark-souled monsters lurking under the civilized world’s bed.

In his latest piece for the National Review, Michael Ledeen comes to the same conclusion: Know Thine Enemy.

Accustomed as we are to believing that everything in the world has to do with us, we’ve misunderstood what the recent beheadings are all about. The terrorists are not trying to make us cower. They are not using the beheadings as a technique to drive us out. Insofar as the slaughter of Westerners affects the policies of Coalition members, the same effect could be accomplished by other forms of murder; a government that is prepared to be routed from Iraq will turn tail when its public demands it, regardless of how its citizens have been killed.

This is not about us — it is about them. The beheading films are recruitment tools. They’ve been around for a long time, part and parcel of the first generation of “jihad” home movies, circulated mostly in North Africa to excite homicidal fanatics and lure them into the Islamist bands. The main difference between then and now is that their marketing and distribution have improved, thanks to their comrades at al Jazeera and al Arabiya, and the Internet.

We should have no trouble understanding this and drawing the proper conclusions. A movement that draws its foot soldiers from people who dream of beheading one of us is clearly a barbarous phenomenon, one that puts the lie to the notion that our enemies in this terror war are human beings driven to desperation by misery and injustice. Not at all: The recruiting films are aimed at subhuman homicidal maniacs who revel in bloody brutality. Given the human capacity to rationalize most any ghastly behavior, some of the killers’ supporters — even in the Western intelligentsia — include misguided souls who are so confused they can accept and even justify barbarism in the name of the cause of the moment. There is nothing new in invoking ends to justify dreadful means. But in this case, the means — the beheadings — define our enemies and their followers.

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