Why I think of it now I don't know. It was an attempt by the Bush Administration and Fox News to deny Jihadist suicide bombers, in Isreal or elsewhere, to change the common term for what they were, and so deny them any claim to heroism by this outward show of condemnation.
I myself knew it was nonsense in the beginning, recognized the patriarchal condensation for what it was.The thought that we little people wouldn't know it was wrong unless the authorities repeatedly told us so. Still I didn't think it was of any real importance, just some boilerplate political fuckery overdramatised by cable news. Yet looking back now, it strikes me as a very loud warning of the catastrophe to come, because it showed that the leaders of the US government. shared an important characteristic with terrorists. People in the Bush administration took it for granted themselves that violently intense belief is inherently noble and that dying for a cause is inherently legitimizing to that cause.
That's why they felt the need to make a show of pointing out that 'homicide bombing' was wrong, not because they saw getting oneself killed for the sake of taking some strangers with him as wrong itself. Quite the contrary, they saw it as the greatest thing a human could hope to do so long as it was for the sake of American empire. In their eyes the human roman candle act was wrong only when it was done in insolent resistance to that empire.
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