the Islamist bomb

Just a couple of days ago I was saying how tempting it would be to go back to the September 10, 2001, mindset and do a Scarlett O’Hara (”I’ll think about it tomorrow”).

Noah Feldman, writing in the New York Times Magazine, looking squarely at Muslim-on-Muslim violence and at the threat of nuclear proliferation from the perspective of changing attitudes toward jihad in the Muslim world, reminds me why it is so important for all of us to focus our minds rather than self-narcotize.

Within the world of radical Islam, there are those who believe that the erosion of the laws of jihad has gone too far. There are reports of difficulty recruiting foreign candidates for suicide missions directed at Iraqi civilians. The debate about how jihad may be prosecuted is not over by any means. But it is an unavoidable fact that the classic restrictions on the killing of women, children and Muslims in jihad have been deeply undermined in the last decade.

V.

If the Islamic laws of war are under revision, or at least the subject of intense debate, what does that mean for the question of the Islamic bomb? The answer is that the expanding religious sanction for violence once thought unacceptable opens the way for new kinds of violence to be introduced and seen as legitimate in turn. First Israeli women and children became acceptable targets; then Americans; then Shiites; and now Sunnis of unstinting orthodoxy. It would seem that no one is out of bounds.

It’s a long piece, dispassionate, and well worth reading.