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Is it Cowardly to Kill Innocents?
Why does everyone insist on calling terror attacks “cowardly”?
Surprising one’s opponent in a fight is a smart tactic, and one we use often ourselves. A shooter would be foolish to state their intentions in advance. When one fights, the primary goal is to win. So I think it is both mistaken and even deceptive to describe the act as “cowardly.” Indeed, since the terrorists usually plan to end up dead anyway, they really are not guilty of lacking courage.
Let’s call things as they are: It is not cowardly to try to kill innocent people. It is, simply, evil.
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I’m with you. I get annoyed with that also. Hitler is often called a coward, but really he seemed to have earned his Iron Cross in World War I, and he took risks leading Germany that initially paid off.
Calling him a coward in some way underestimates the power of evil.
Exactly. I suspect that most terrorists are really quite brave. Mostly young, deluded, misled, morally malformed, but damned brave. Like the men of the Waffen SS.
There’s a tiny part of me which mourns the loss of men such as these, and all of the rest of me which absolutely hates… no other words for it… the men and ideologies which so misused this human potential.
I’d like to share another phrase which drives me bonkers when I hear it to describe terrorist incidents, and that phrase is “senseless violence”.
In the terrorist context, violence is either effective (in that it terrorizes) or it is not. In terrorist-speak, “senseless” violence is equivalent to “poorly planned” violence.. for instance in the premature use of missile bombardments from Gaza before Hamas was fully prepared to exploit their tunnels.
BTW, iWc, I always enjoy your posts even when I’m not wholly in agreement.
I agree with both of you, they are doing exactly what their Koran teaches, to terrorize, kill, and then go to their 72 virgins.
Something can be both cowardly and evil, of course.
But I think “dishonorable” is what people really mean when they say “cowardly” in this context. To me, the word “cowardly” would imply that the actor is both acting dishonorably and attempting to avoid danger. In these terrorist attacks, the terrorists are generally not trying to avoid danger to themselves, which removes that element. The element of dishonor remains, of course, but people don’t use terms like “honor” and “dishonor” anymore. I’m not sure why.
Cowardly because we westerners have a way of war that proscribes killing innocents.
I’m confident that the jihadist train of thought truly qualifies as the definition of insanity.
Intentionally killing innocents is cowardly. How could it be otherwise? There is no courage involved in killing a defenseless person.
Steve, in the Islamist mind, non muslim are not innocents, they are infidels, thus deserving of being killed.
These people are taught from babyhood, if a person does not believe in allah they deserve death. They are not insane. They now have schools for children to learn to behead, torture and kill anyone who is not their type of muslim. They believe we are insane for not admitting allah is the greatest and submitting, thus keeping our heads. The first Christians, the Essenes, (Dead Sea Scrolls) believed that in the future there would be a great war between the prince of light and the prince of darkness. This great war may soon be upon us.
I have often thought that myself.
It is both cowardly and evil to specificallly target unarmed, defenseless individuals who represent no threat to the would be killer. The fact that the assassin knows that he is likely to be killed in the attack is no act of bravery. It might be a sign of insanity.
Gosh Kay; you could call it evil or evil influence, but I stand by my definition of insanity:
In criminal law, a disease, defect, or condition of the mind that renders one unable to understand the nature of a criminal act or the fact that it is wrong.
If you label jihadism as simply evil, I think you leave the door open to too much interpretation; Hitler was a pretty successful sociopath because nobody understood that there is simply an enormous mental fragility in this world.
Webster’s defines coward thus: “one who shows ignoble fear: a basely timid, easily frightened, and easily daunted person.”
So the word seems to be neutral with respect to good and evil. But I have noticed that the pairing of evil and cowardice is pretty common in literature. And my sense is that the killer who fears for his or her own life is on a lower rung on the ladder of evil than the killer who is not afraid of dying himself or herself. To me, it is a distinction without a difference, but I guess it is meaningful to others.
It’s part and parcel with the decline of patriotism. If nothing else, for the unpatriotic, it’s patriotism that’s become dishonorable though it’s never phrased that way. There’s nothing new about that sentiment. Samuel Johnson implied that patriots were scoundrels way back in 1775, but it’s in the United States (and Europe) that it gained traction in the 1960’s.
The Webster’s definition goes on to say “lacking courage.” When someone intentionally kills an innocent, defenseless person, that someone is lacking in courage – regardless of his belief system and regardless of whether or not he has a sense that the murder will doom him. By the way, it is interesting that these non-cowardly killers of innocents usually try to get away. Is that cowardly?
I’m more bothered by the tendency to call evil people crazy. It often demonstrates an unwillingness to understand evil by facing it.
There is no shame in being willing to imagine evil motivations while choosing to embrace love and light.
There’s no shame either in lacking the capacity for such emotional distance as allows some to deeply understand evil. I’m happy for those with innocent imaginations.
But there is guilt in surrendering the will to fully confront reality to the best of one’s ability.
I guess when I think “coward,” I hear “afraid” and “pitiful.”
Because the terrorists are the aggressors, I have no sympathy for them, and I don’t care if they are afraid. So to use a sympathetic word like “coward” to describe a terrorist seems off-kilter to me.
So someone who saves his or her own life at the expense of others’ lives is a coward but not a terrorist in my mind.
Don’t be. It’s far easier and more efficient to stop destructive behavior with defined terms such as “sociopathic.” The term “evil” can so easily be manipulated by moral relativists.
We have little time left for philosophical debate; a bit of hard core pragmatism is critical.
A sympathetic word like “coward?” I hope never to be the beneficiary of such a sympathetic term.
And the question for debate was, “Is it cowardly to kill innocents?” Not is it cowardly to save one’s “own life at the expense of others’ lives…” To save one’s own life by throwing a survivor or two out of a life boat would indeed be a cowardlly act. It would also be the killing of an innocent or two, assuming that the victims did nothing to instigate the action.
Cowardice is letting these people settle in one’s nation in the first place due to the desire to not be called “racist” by some activist group.
These people are taught from babyhood, if a person does not believe in allah they deserve death. They are not insane. They now have schools for children to learn to behead, torture and kill anyone who is not their type of muslim. They believe we are insane for not admitting allah is the greatest and submitting, thus keeping our heads. The first Christians, the Essenes, (Dead Sea Scrolls) believed that in the future there would be a great war between the prince of light and the prince of darkness. This great war may soon be upon us.
I’d say it has been upon us since at least October 23, 1983. BTW I enlisted in the Marines less than one year later.
Coward is a pejorative for people who behave shamefully under the influence of fear. Do not pity cowards.
Everybody feels fear. If a person is paralyzed in screaming terror, that is not cowardice, but failure, and we each fail from time to time. Cowardice is waiting for somebody else to catch your bullet. Not everybody can do every thing, and that is fine. But cowardice is special.
Bravery is reserved for those who behave honorably in the face of fear. How many of these splodeydopes would offer a leg instead of their lives? Delusions about 72 raisins or whatever do not constitute bravery.
Please consider the difference between jumping on a grenade in a split-second in order to minimize casualties, and deliberately blowing oneself up in order to maximize civilian carnage. There is a certain fortitude in common, but one is bravery, and the other is cowardice.
Agreed. And let’s stop calling things like what happened in Canada Wednesday “tragedies.” This isn’t “one of those things.” It’s at minimum a crime, even worse terror, and at its core an act of war.
I never understood it either. Calling killers cowards is like calling murder “ill-conceived.” It just doesn’t make sense to apply it.
If you believe that people who reject your faith are defacto enemies, then it is perfectly rational to believe murdering them is the right thing to do. Whether that is cowardly or not is completely irrelevant.
He ran his car into a light-rail station and killed a three-month old baby.
He is every bad adjective in the dictionary, including cowardly.
He decided to die while targeting others. That is not cowardice. It is stupid and wrong and evil.
They are cowardly for attacking civilians, rather than military forces capable of fighting back. If the suicide bomber who sets off his bomb in a cafe is not himself cowardly, then the people who sent him surely are. But you have to give one thing to ISIS – they don’t seem to be afraid of anyone. They attack civilians, military, anyone they can find. They just don’t seem to care.
Which reminds me of a line from the (very bad) movie, Daredevil. The villains are talking, and one asks: “How do you kill a man with no fear?” The other villain says: “You have to put the fear in.” That seems to me to be a better strategy for dealing with ISIS than anything Obama has come up with.
Nobody is arguing that these deeds are not evil. Cowardice and evil are not opposed, and one does not eclipse the other. They mean different things.
I think that one reason the term cowardice is often preferred to evil is that an evil person may relish the word, but a coward will not.
Men are wired to eschew cowardice, and if allowed to develop normally will not tolerate it. If reared correctly, they will understand their development, and focus it appropriately.
I heard an interview with Conn Iggulden, co-author of The Dangerous Book for Boys, on Hugh Hewitt. Hewitt asked about the propriety of allowing a child to get so far up in a tree that a fall could mean serious injury. How is that responsible parenting? Iggulden said, “There’s a lot to weigh at a time like that, but better a broken arm than a broken spirit.”
Anyway, rambling. Off to dinner.
Oh and ladies, I’m not slighting you. Kind of like my agnosticism, I wouldn’t dare pronounce the nature of the divine.
And self-evidently cowardly, if we are talking about the charmer who drove his car into a light rail station and killed a three month old baby (presumably unarmed).
Yes, that’s the point, isn’t it? It is cowardly to kill someone who has no chance of defending himself and is not a threat of any sort to the would be killer.
It was once considered honorable to settle disputes with dueling pistols. Two disputants armed similarly with seconds and witnesses to ensure a fair fight took part. Cultures that used the practice considered the ritual to require manly courage because both participants had an equal chance of living or dying. If one participant turned before the appointed time and shot the other in the back, it might be a smart tactic, coopting the element of surprise and securing victory, but it would not be a fair fight, would not be honorable and would in fact be cowardly.
All of this might be whistling past the graveyard, but if you’re attacking someone you know will not be able to fight back, is that bravery? So what’s the opposite of bravery?
Fanaticism should not be confused with normal human behaviors. So slapping a label on it isn’t going to change anything. Move the information around a bit, if a criminal, a drug dealer, does a drive-by and kills someone he knows is unarmed, is it cowardly?
I think the other descriptions are apt here. It’s just evil, in one of its various forms. No need to pretend that the same kinds of human sensibilities apply to fanatics.