DAVID SOLWAY: Islam and the Future of the West.

In End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate, philosopher Jon Mills reflects on the Taliban attack with machine guns and explosives on a school in Peshawar, in which 132 schoolchildren were slaughtered. The act is almost incomprehensible. “The immediate dislocation of understanding any rational means behind such atrocities,” he writes “is emotionally unfathomable for the simple fact that it disrupts our psychic need for a moral order in the universe.” It represents a “pathological breach” in our implicit conviction that we live in a civilized world. “It takes only one act of barbarism,” he concludes, “to remind us that evil is no illusion.” Of course, the single act of barbarism can be and is multiplied exponentially all over the world every moment of the day, but there exists one world-historical belief system in which such occasions are both justified and mandated.

Any reading of the Koran, as Robert Spencer, Raymond Ibrahim, Ali Sina, Ibn Warrak, Rebecca Bynum, and a host of other excellent scholars make abundantly clear, will reveal ayah after ayah commanding acts of grotesque violence against unbelievers. The reward for the martyrs who have been slain in service to Allah will be peace, loveliness, and virgins with pear-shaped breasts, as stipulated variously in Sura 44:45-55 and 78:31-36 of the Koran.

The Taliban killers said they were justified in committing so feral and heinous an act as payback for the harms they themselves had unjustifiably endured. What we are witnessing, however, is an expression of what Mills calls the “ethics of evil,” which is nothing less than “the justification of self-righteousness while perpetrating evil under the guise of moral superiority.”

Read the whole thing.