What happened in Fallujah one year ago?

Louis Rene Beres writes:

How shall we truly understand what happened on the last day of March one year ago, when an Iraqi mob of Muslims burned, desecrated and hanged four American contractors from a bridge in Fallujah? Utterly jubilant in their orgy of mutilation and murder, the members of this frenzied mob seemed to be acting in ways that were only marginally human. In fact, however, their behaviors were not only decidedly human, they were also tied intimately to certain distinct and long-enduring forms of religious worship. I refer specifically to the undiscarded practice of ritual sacrifice.

To find plausible comparisons with what happened at Fallujah, we needn`t go back to medieval times. Rather, only a few years earlier, a similar mob in Palestinian Ramallah tortured, gouged out the eyes, disemboweled and burned two entirely defenseless human beings. The sacrificial victims of that particular day, two Russian-speaking Israelis who had gotten lost on the roads, were not in any way identifiable to the mob as individual persons. For the sacrificers, it was more than enough that they were "Jews." For that reason alone, Vadim Norjitz and Yossi Avrahami were ripped apart with a measure of bliss and cruelty that seemed to defy all rational conduct.

Fallujah, like Ramallah before it, must be understood in America and Israel as much more than an explosion of passionate hatreds. It was, more than anything else, a selected venue for primal sacrifice. We shall now need to better recognize this religious dynamic before we can prevent its intermittent recurrence in Iraq, Israel, the United States or elsewhere.

Read the entire article, here, published by the Jewish Press.