c. 2004 Religion News Service

(David P. Gushee is the Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University in Jackson, Tenn.)

(UNDATED) I made a commitment to read the report of the Sept. 11 commission before the third anniversary of those horrible attacks arrived. Two movie images came into my mind as I read the parts of the report that discussed the organization and activities of the Islamist terrorist network, especially al-Qaida.

One was a recurring scene in James Bond movies in which bad guys sit around in what my wife and I like to call the “giant underground complex” and plan their mayhem.

In just such places, more modest than the movies perhaps, Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Mohamed Atta and many others converged to plan calmly, methodically and happily for the mass murder of Americans.

The other movie image is even more sinister, though more far-fetched. It is the scene from the thriller “Independence Day” in which the American president asks the invading alien, “What do you want from us?” and the alien simply responds, “Die.” It is at this point that the president catches the full vision of what the aliens have in mind in visiting our planet _ total annihilation.

The Sept. 11 commission report paints a picture of the terrorist network drawn from that network’s own testimony, both in public and in private, both while free and under imprisonment. What these men want from us is that we die.

In 1998 bin Laden publicly offered a “fatwa,” or religious edict, in which he declared killing Americans the “individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” We have seen in more recent days that other “infidels” fall under the same rubric: Europeans, anyone allied with us in Iraq, non-fundamentalist Muslim regimes, Russians and of course Jews/Israelis.

It is important to be completely clear about the nature of this hatred. These people do not hate us for specific things that we have done, in the sense that if we would stop doing them they would choose to live at peace with us. They hate us because of what we are _ modern, pluralistic, Christian, Jewish, liberal, affirming of women’s liberties, and so on.

Think of it this way: If they hate Turkey not for being Christian but for being insufficiently Islamic, and if they hate the leaders of Saudi Arabia not for being Christian but for being friendly with the United States, how much more do they hate us for being what they think we are _ in Osama’s words, “the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind”?

As I read this report, I realized, to my horror, that I had seen this kind of existential hatred before, in my study of Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler and the hard-core anti-Semites around him had also allowed an irrational, vicious, existential hatred of a people to settle into their hearts and determine the course of their actions.

Previous anti-Jewish activities in Western history were horrible, to be sure. But never before had a group decided that the Jews were so irredeemable that the only thing that could be done with them was to annihilate them all. That is what Hitler believed, and that is what he led an entire nation to do.

I am now persuaded that the very same kind of existential hatred is to be found among Islamist terrorists. Just like Hitler, they would kill us all (Jews, Christians, Americans) if they could. The only thing that prevents them from doing so is that they lack the means. Think of it this way: If Osama bin Laden could get his hands on you and your children, he would kill you.

This is raw evil. It cannot be apologized for or excused in any way. It cannot be deterred. It cannot be negotiated with.

In “Independence Day,” when the president realizes that the agenda of the aliens is “Die,” his entire perspective shifts. It’s a kill-or-be-killed situation, and so he mobilizes the world’s surviving forces to fight back.

Kill or be killed. It is the same discovery that Winston Churchill made (early) about the Nazis, and that Franklin Roosevelt came to share. It involves seeing into the reality of evil, however ugly and tragic, and being willing to draw the appropriate conclusions.

MO/PH END GUSHEE