God save us from Evil!

Dyab Abou Jahjah
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The horrifying images of Da'esh terrorists burning the Jordanian pilot alive have been haunting me since I saw them yesterday. Like most of you, I could not ignore the video—I had to watch it.
Burning someone alive is something we all thought belonged to the dark chapters of history, to the dark ages of Europe, when witches were set aflame by zealous mobs. We had barely come to terms with the brutality of beheadings, and now this.
As I watched, there was a moment when I had to look away—I couldn’t bear it any longer. But then I forced myself to watch again. I wanted to witness the horror, to let the anger rise inside me. And it did.
But this is not the end of the story.
This is not even the beginning.

The thing with anger is that it stops you from thinking. It overwhelms your senses. I found myself wondering why I was so angry. Was it because they did this in my name? Not just in the name of Islam—an important part of my identity—but, more than that, in the name of my grievances as an Arab and a Muslim. In the name of the injustices inflicted upon Arab peoples by their own regimes, upon Palestinians and others by Israel, and upon the Muslim world—and by extension, the entire Global South—by Western powers.
I was also angry because they forced me to sympathize with a pilot serving a regime that acts as a repressive tool for Israel and the United States—just as it was a tool of British colonialism before them. I did not want to sympathize with him, not with his king, not with his corrupt regime. Yet I did. And that angered me.
In the propaganda video that preceded the gruesome execution, Da'esh justified their act by linking it to the pilot’s role in burning them with his bombs. True, the pilot was not dropping chocolate bars from his F-16—he was raining down fire. But does that make his execution justified?
To be clear, jihadists do not see the pilot as merely an individual. They project onto him an entire history of massacres and carpet bombings carried out from the air—whether by Arabs, Israelis, or Westerners. For them, it all starts in the 1920s (the Rif War, the Battle of Maysaloun, the Libyan and Iraqi rebellions), moves into the 1940s with the Nakba, then to the 1950s and 1960s (the Suez Crisis, the Algerian War, the Six-Day War), continues with the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and culminates in 1991’s Desert Storm and the 2003 illegal war against Iraq, which opened this hornet’s nest.
All of these were real massacres, with millions of civilian victims. In Algeria alone, France killed over a million people. During the Rif War, Spain and France dropped chemical weapons from the air, killing thousands—an impact still felt by the population today.
This long history of death and destruction, still alive in the collective memory of Arabs and Muslims, was inflicted from the skies—by Western air forces or their proxy forces.
Entire families, entire cities burned alive in their homes, cars, and shelters.
In Lebanon, 1982, Israeli airstrikes flattened buildings, killing hundreds of civilians—including children—who were either burned or buried alive.
Just last summer, in Gaza, Israel perfected the cowardly art of slaughtering people from a distance, using drones and remote-controlled precision weapons. For the remote-controlled killer, human beings become mere dots on a screen. And for the media, they become statistics—a simple death toll used to measure the success of an operation.
But for those who survive these attacks—or witness them up close—the smell of blood and burning flesh is as real as it gets.
The Question of BarbarismYet, killing a prisoner—burning him alive—is more barbaric than shelling people to death from a distance. And I am not being sarcastic—I truly believe it is more barbaric.
First, because it violates every code of war—you do not execute prisoners, you do not torture them. These are war crimes, just as intentionally killing civilians is a war crime.
But here is the hypocrisy:
You can kill civilians as long as your intention is not to kill them.
You can even be reckless—bomb their homes after telling them to leave just a few minutes before—kill them all, and still get away with it.
You can claim that you were taking fire from inside, behind, above, or beneath a house, a hospital, or an ambulance—then obliterate it and everyone inside—and get away with it.
If you need lessons in this, you can always ask the Israeli army to train you.
But executing prisoners--burning them alive--beheading them—that is more barbaric.
It does not follow the rules.
It is more barbaric than carpet bombing.
It is even more barbaric than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Because those acts—despite being atrocities—were methodical, industrial, surgical, and precisely executed.
They were civilized.
They were products of Western civilization.
They were not barbaric because they were quantified, measured, and well-communicated.
The Hypocrisy of "Civilized" ViolenceJust like the genocidal rampage of Western colonialism in Africa and the Americas—which exterminated millions—was not considered barbaric.
It was civilized.
Even the Holocaust is rarely referred to in Western discourse as an act of barbarism. It is seen as a dark side of Western civilization—but a manifestation of it nonetheless.
Which brings us to the key question:
If an act is more barbaric, does that mean it is more evil?
Were the Apache warriors who scalped cowboys more evil than the men they killed—who were carrying out ethnic cleansing and genocide on their land?
Were the African tribes who violently resisted colonial rule, at times massacring white colonial agents, more evil than colonialism itself?
What I despise most about Da'esh is the same thing I despise most about their enemies—the evil of oppressing, enslaving, displacing, and murdering human beings.
Whether it is done from afar or up close, whether with gloves or with bare hands, whether civilized or barbaric--evil is evil.
And in this conflict, evil exists on both sides.
And we are all trapped in between.
May God save us all from evil—whether barbaric or civilized.