Dead Cant Rant

Roger Ebert’s latest column in today’s Express-News (available online at his website) reveals much about his thoughts on the morality of mass-murder by “suicide” bomber. In his review of the film The Terrorist (under the heading “great movies”) he discusses the main character, Malli, and her decision to become a suicide bomber for what is essentially the Tamil Tigers, a violent, radical — and, in an interesting twist, completely secular — separatist group in Sri Lanka that has conducted over 200 suicide bombings in a civil war that has killed more than 60,000 in the past 20 years.

Suicide bombing is not inherently right or wrong, according to Ebert. It’s merely one more tool, and damn the civilians murdered to achieve their evil goals:

This is not a film about the rightness or wrongness of her cause or the political situation that inspired it. It simply and heartbreakingly observes for a few days as a young woman prepares to become a suicide bomber.

God forbid we should ever make a value judgment. Two paragraphs later Ebert almost rescues himself from the precipice of moral stupidity, then turns and dives off the cliff:

A movement that encourages suicide so that it can benefit from that annihilation is monstrously selfish: Let people like The Leader, who thanks Malli for her death by treating her to lunch, blow himself up, if he is so sure someone must.

In other words, it is selfish for anyone to ask someone else to blow themselves up, but if YOU truly believe in YOUR cause then YOU are perfectly entitled to commit mass murder. Way to go, Roger. Way to go.

By now you can expect that he believes that the suicide bomber is the true victim, not the innocent civilians who die. Proof?

I admire “The Terrorist” because it sidesteps the ideology, the question of which side is right and which side is wrong, the political motives, the tactical reasons and simply says: Here is a young woman who has decided to kill and be killed for a cause. Look in her eyes, listen to her voice, watch her as she lives for a few days, and ask yourself what motivates her, and why. Every time I see the film, I feel a great sadness, that a human imagination could be so limited that it sees its own extinction as a victory.

Standing idly by and refusing to confront and identify evil when it occurs makes you a willing accomplice. Roger Ebert has a long track record of moral equivalency — a long track record as an accomplice.