Madam, - Dr Vincent Kenny (July 9th) is well wide of the mark when he seeks to conflate the Christian tradition of "martyrdom" and the current spate of Islamist suicide bombings, styled as "martyrdom missions".
In the Christian context, a martyr is an innocent person who, without seeking death, is murdered for his or her religious faith or convictions. Consider such examples as the early Christians put to death by the Roman authorities or, in our own time, American civil rights workers who sought equal rights and who risked, and often lost, their own lives to achieve this end. In such cases, the act of passive suffering bears testament to the transformative power of redemptive witness. "Unearned suffering is redemptive," counselled Martin Luther King, and can be used to effect "positive change" in the world.
This is entirely different from the Islamist "martyrs" who flew airliners into the World Trade Center, or the Palestinian suicide bombers who seek "martyrdom" by exploding themselves in bars and cafes. Such cases are not "martyrdom", but murder, where the immolation of the self is a strategic necessity for the incineration of others. When we confer the title of "martyr" on these people, we lend them an innocence that they do not possess.
This is a crucial, unmissable distinction. In one, innocence submits itself to suffering to redeem a guilty world; in another, suffering is inflicted upon the innocent by the guilty. Any attempt to locate common ground between the two is destined for confusion and contradiction. So it proves in Dr Kenny's letter, where the Twin Towers are deemed a "powerful symbol of evil" to the "millions of innocent victims of capitalism", and so "Islam", which suffers "so much" in our "capitalist world", struck out at it.
In this bizarre reading, the killers of 9/11 become ventriloquists for the thwarted voices of international justice, and those slaughtered on that day are no more deserving of our sympathy than the "millions" of "victims" of capitalism - as if judgment of a social system, once pronounced "evil", can be delivered by levelling one of its "symbols" and killing those inside.
The holes in this kind of thinking are plainly obvious, and its conclusions should be met with repugnance. Modern terrorism does indeed challenge us - all of us, of all different faiths - to the "core of our beliefs". But the challenge is this: do we, as a society, submit to an onslaught of murderous violence - or do we fight it? - Yours, etc,
SEAN COLEMAN, Lindisfarne Lawn, Clondalkin, Dublin 22.
Madam, - The comments by Dr Vincent Kenny must be some of the most misguided and outrageous ever to have appeared in your Letters page.
He seeks somehow to equate the suicide and "martyrdom" of Islamists with the Christian martyrs of the past. In so doing, he says that Christians need to more honestly reflect on the religious implications of the Islamists' beliefs, seeming to suggest that the Islamist suicide is no different to the deaths of the Christian martyrs of old. What an obscene insult to those who were martyred for their beliefs, as opposed to those who kill for their beliefs.
Dr Kenny also writes that "Christian political leaders, or "those whose faith is informed by Christian beliefs" should urgently examine and reassess the consequences of "their social, economic and political policies", which he says are "unjust". As the recent attempted mass murders in London and Glasgow indicate, Islamist terrorism has nothing to do with being deprived or downtrodden because of Western policies.
It has everything to do with the fact that, as they constantly tell us loudly and clearly, the aim of Islamism is to destroy Western civilisation and to subject us all to Sharia law. These terrorists hate us with a vengeance and consider us to be sub-human beings who should either be made to mend our ways by converting to Islam, or be killed. The suicide "martyrs", as Dr Kenny calls them, are mass murderers of innocent people, nothing more and nothing less.
Letters such as Dr Kenny's only lend succour and support to madmen; they do nothing whatever to shine a light on the truth. - Yours, etc,
EAMONN GAVIN, Terenure, Dublin 6w.