If you don't think like me, are you crazy?

Thursday, July 25, 2002

The current drama in an Alexandria, VA, federal courtroom seems to highlight a theme prevalent throughout the world: If your thoughts, desires, strategies and tactics are vastly different from mine, you must be crazy.
 

Be honest, now. If you're a typical American (and yes, I believe such a category still exists), don't you think that the popular Middle Eastern approach to redress of grievances through random assassination of innocents is crazy? If you're European (and yes, that includes Britain), don't you think that many typically American principles, ideals and methods are crazy? And don't all of us, supporters and detractors of Israel alike, think that it's crazy to try and thrive as a nation surrounded by countries whose guiding light in all matters is the total destruction of your own country? And yet, all of the people on the "crazy" end of the above equations believe they're not only perfectly sane, but their antagonists are the crazy ones.
 

So this brings us back to the federal courtroom where Zacarias Moussaoui wants to plead guilty to charges of conspiracy in connection with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America. The lawyers assigned to assist him in his defense assert that anyone that would plead guilty to such charges, knowing that there's a strong likelihood of being sentenced to death, must be crazy, and have asked Judge Leonie Brinkema to send Moussaoui to the nuthouse for more testing. I mean, really, he's got to be loony to consistently and deliberately take actions and make statements which will surely get him killed at the hands of the despised U.S. government, right?
 

To me, Moussaoui's actions in his court case merely indicate that he is as willing to rush into martyrdom as his buds were on those four planes last year. Obviously, this fixation on mass murder through suicide is anathema to most people outside the Middle East, but are they crazy? Or are all their values so distant from our own that we just have no foundation on which to build some kind of understanding of our self-proclaimed enemies?
 

I'm not sure what we should conclude about all this on the global scale. But it certainly seems to me that Judge Brinkema made the right decision to deny the motions by Moussaoui's unwanted defense attorneys to reevaluate his sanity. His death wish doesn't make him crazy, just incomprehensible.