How can human beings commit such horrors? This is the question raised again and again as new unspeakable atrocities are committed in different parts of the world. It has been raised repeatedly as the horrors of the Holocaust have been widely impressed on contemporary consciousness. In some countries this has taken some time, either because people resisted the knowledge that their own parents or grandparents were in one way or another accessories to these crimes, or simply because the mind shrinks from acknowledging the facts. Today, with the speed of communication media, information about these facts is available much more quickly. This was the case with the mass murders committed in Cambodia, Rwanda and during the collapse of the Yugoslav state. It is the case today in the face of the hell on earth created by ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
One aspect of the question refers to the astonishing fact that thousands of young people from Western democracies (notably France, Britain and Germany) are running away from their families to join ISIS. Probably most of them come from the families of Muslim immigrants (though very few parents approved or even knew about the radicalization of their children). There were also some converts from families with no Muslim connections. Often recruitment occurs by way of the Internet. The very images that horrify most viewers actually serve to inspire some young people, especially men (the sizable number of young female recruits seem to be motivated by the prospect of marrying Islamist fighters). It is probably no accident that enthusiasm for jihad among young Europeanism is linked to their propensity to be viciously anti-Semitic. In 1946, just after the liberation of France from the occupation of Nazi Germany, Jean-Paul Sartre published his Reflections on the Jewish Question (the title of the English translation is Anti-Semite and Jew). Sartre’s portrait of the typical anti-Semite is one in flight from the human condition—an individual who wants to be like a force of nature, a thunderstorm, or a cascade of rocks—in other words, anything but a vulnerable mortal. Another way of putting this is to say that anti-Semitic murderers (Sartre was well situated to observe them at close range) deny their own death by inflicting death on a helpless victim. I think that this interpretation applies quite well to the mindset of an adolescent who has experienced humiliation, ridicule or exclusion—and now feels invincible, even immortal, as he slits the throat of an ISIS prisoner.
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