Pahalgam is a historic opportunity to change the jihadi DNA of Pakistan – Firstpost

The terrorist attack on April 22, 2025, in Pahalgam, Jammu & Kashmir, resulted in the death of 26 people, mostly Hindus. The gory details of the massacre — from the perpetrators checking the identity cards of people to confirm whether they were non-Muslims, to singling out non-Muslims by asking them to recite an Islamic verse and, in extreme cases, pulling down their pants to leave nothing to chance — reminded many of the October 7 incident in Israel.

Though the killings in Israel last year were much bigger in scale and intensity, one finds similarity in the nature of the two massacres. The perpetrators in both cases were extremely proud of what they were doing. They were highly animated and boastful, and the guilt of indulging in the killing of another human being was missing. It was as if those killed were either not worth living or were not human beings at all.

This tendency to relish at the plight of others has been poignantly brought out by Douglas Murray in his book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization. Murray, a British journalist working with The Spectator, records an interaction between a terrorist involved in the October 7 massacre and his family members:

One of the recordings from the 7th, from that first atrocity video, was a recording of one of the terrorists who had got into the kibbutz of Mefalsim, a community of just over a thousand people in the south of Israel. In the midst of the attack the terrorist made a phone call back to his family in Gaza. The excitement in his voice was obvious.
“Hi Dad,” the three-minute call begins. “Open my WhatsApp now and you will see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!”
The father replies, “May God protect you.”
The son is exultant.
“Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands.”
He goes on and on repeating himself. Boasting. “Dad, I killed ten! Ten with my own hands! Put Mom on.”
“Oh my son. God bless you,” say the parents.
Their son keeps making the same boasts to his mother.
“I wish I was with you,” she replies.
“Mom, your son is a hero,” he boasts.

The perpetrators of October 7 and April 22 are seen as “heroes”, by some. This cannot happen without dehumanising oneself and also delegitimising the lives of those believed to be enemies. In this worldview, there is no redemption for the other, howsoever noble and good he might have been in real life.

Most people indulging in the ghastly acts of October 7 and April 22 are not your usual sociopaths. They could be the average person leading their usual lives. But the ‘usualness’ gets broken now and then with the ‘unusualness’ of October 7 and April 22. It is only when such terror incidents take place, that you realise the duality of their lives. Maybe this two-facedness was always there. It is we who failed to see it.

History is full of such examples, especially in medieval Bharat, where a saintly figure would be seen rebuking a Delhi Sultan for failing to take up jihad against Hindus, or a poet who is often hailed as an “icon of secularism”, writing poems in praise of a bigoted Sultanate ruler. Among rulers, one can look at Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty in Bharat, who was eloquently described by Jawaharlal Nehru as “an attractive person, a typical Renaissance prince, bold and adventurous, fond of art and literature and good living”. Salman Rushdie brings out Babur’s two-facedness in his Introduction to Wheeler M Thackston’s translation of The Baburnama. While writing about Babur’s conquest of Chanderi in 1528 AD, Rushdie writes:

First comes the blood-thirsty description of the killing of many infidels’ and the apparent mass suicide of two or three hundred more. (“They killed each other almost to the last by having one man hold a sword while the others willingly bent their necks… A tower of infidels’ skulls was erected on the hill on the northwest side of Chanderi.”) Then just three sentences later, we get this: “Chanderi is a superb place. All around the area are many flowing streams… The lake… is renowned throughout Hindustan for its good, sweet water. It is truly a nice little lake.”

An average Islamist would indulge in killings and then a moment later look around to admire the beauty of a lake, a river, a valley, et al. He is born and brought up in the world of contradictions: a world where a person’s goodness, virtues and honesty count for nothing if he is born in a wrong religion; a world where the most heinous of crimes could be termed virtuous.

This makes the war against Islamist terrorism a tough, never-ending affair — a war that has many fronts but no frontline. (Remember, a few men and women in this country who refused to trample upon the Pakistani flags placed on the streets by some angry Hindus after the Pahalgam killings.) And this brings, again, Douglas Murray’s book to the mind, wherein he talks about his friend named George Weidenfeld. George was a Viennese Jew, born in 1919, who survived Nazi atrocities to die in 2016. Despite having a first-hand experience of Nazi mayhems, George believed Islamists were far worse anti-Semites than the Nazis.

Murray writes,

It was an extraordinary claim to make, in some ways. But as George used to explain, while Hamas, al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, and others had so far not managed to be as genocidal as the Nazis, there was no doubt that they would be if they could. Still, there was something about their actions and their motivations that made them distinct. George would be the last person to ever downplay the culpability of the Nazis who had killed so many of his friends and family. But he noted, as many historians have, that as evil as they were in general, the Nazis attempted to cover over the worst of their crimes. Consider what the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, said in his speech to his most senior lieutenants in October 1943 as he detailed what the Nazis sought to achieve with the Holocaust: “We can talk about it among ourselves, yet we will never speak of it in public… I am referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people… It is,” he said, “a page of glory in our history that has never been written and is never to be written.” Himmler and his SS were among the most evil people in human history, yet even they had sought to cover over their crimes. Here, in 2023, in the form of Hamas, were people who were boasting of their crimes, were proud of their crimes, and indeed wanted to broadcast their crimes for all the world to see.

It’s this nature of Islamism that makes it so dangerous, and a war against it an almost never-ending affair. For, the perpetrators of crimes — and their supporters — are absolutely certain about the sanctity of their act. And, then, there’s the dominant Left-‘liberal’ ecosystem that provides intellectual legitimacy to such jihadi acts through its ‘root-cause’ whataboutery and also by resurrecting the ghost of Islamophobia.

Islamism can be vanquished if it is fought with the spirit the Nazis were defeated. Here it needs to be understood that Islamism, unlike Nazism, has countless fronts but no particular frontier. However, Pakistan could be an apt starting point, given the fact that Islamabad remains a self-proclaimed fountainhead of global jihad. Pahalgam, thus, is a historic opportunity for Bharat and the West: to work in tandem to change the jihadi DNA of Pakistan.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.