A post by Clayton Cramer titled "The Death Worshippers" has forced me to entertain very peaceful thoughts. Here's Cramer:

A recurring difference between Islam and the West is that Islam worships death. If you think that I am painting with too broad a brush, consider this recent question of textbooks:

As if things weren't crazy enough already in the Middle East, here's the officially sanctioned message in sixth-grade Palestinian textbooks for 11- and 12-year-old kids: "The noble soul has two goals: death and the desire for it."

The goal isn't to build magnificent skyscrapers or write brilliant novels or to work on cures for the world's most lethal diseases. The noble goal for the noble soul is as simple as strapping on a dynamite belt and blowing oneself into a million pieces in an Israeli pizza shop.

The "death-and-the-desire-for-it" line is from a poem by Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud. Along with other writings that glorify child martyrs, the quote is included in "Our Beautiful Language," a standard text for sixth-graders after the Palestinian Liberation Organization took control over education in the Palestinian territories.

As officially stated, the underlying ethos of the Palestinian curriculum is "built on the principle of breeding the individual on the basis of serving society as a whole." Translated, that means breeding kids who believe suicide and murder are noble, who believe it's noble to create a society where the individual reaches his highest stage of development by extinguishing his own individualism, his own existence.

It's Jonestown, writ large, a cult of suicide for the collective, for Palestine. Israel isn't on the maps in the Palestinian textbooks.

Abdullah Qura'an, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, carried a 13-pound bomb in his school bag into a checkpoint near Hablus. He didn't die, because a cell phone rigged to set off the bomb didn't work. The unwitting youngster was told he was carrying car parts.

Shortly thereafter, a 16-year-old suicide bomber, Amar al-Far, outfitted for self-destruction by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, killed three people in an open-air food market in Tel Aviv.

Said the boy's mother: "Why did they choose my son? He was just a child. It's immoral to send someone so young. They should have sent an adult who understands the meaning of his deeds."

The boy's father told of his last encounter with his son: "I was asleep when Amar woke me up. He kissed me and asked for two shekels, 45 cents. He left the house and I went back to sleep."

I am here to report that liberals and conservatives respond very differently to the notion that religion can be a direct cause of human conflict.

This difference does not bode well for the future of liberalism.

It is a rather strange situation where leftists and many liberals, who should have the most to worry about from the increasing dominance of a fiercely homophobic, male chauvinist, anti-freedom of expression, and religiously intolerant worldview, are clearly more afraid of George Bush and Dick Cheney than they are of our common enemy.

The enemy worships death and wants to kill us, and these people (I can't say "we" because I am not one of them) seem stuck in a permanent replay of John Lennon's "Imagine." It's a major difference in perception, one which will not go away, and I don't need to go far to find it. Just today, for example, Inquirer editor John Timpane opined that women can stop war and violence by withholding sex:

Indeed. The force of the strike lies not really in the withholding of sex; it lies in the heroic protest of women denying themselves something they want, too, to get their men to wake up. "This is our way to say to our spouses that we don't want to be left widows and that our children do not deserve to grow up without a father by their side," said Ruth Macías, 18, mother of two and a leg-crosser.

So there are at least two legs to the response to violence. They have to be crossed at the same time. One is what government can do - and it can do much. Last year, the U.S. violent-crime rate rose a little, but it has been falling for years, thanks to more spending and tougher policies. But the other leg is civic action by you, me, and the other guy. And gal. No one lives apart from the spectacle of human violence; we're all involved simply by being human. And if there's something we can do, we should.

This philosophical impasse goes to the root of many hopeless disagreements, and a perfect example is the way some people will blame guns for shootings, while others blame the people who did the shooting.

But considering Plato's maxim that an unexamined life is not worth living, for once maybe I should depart from my usual "Imagine" bashing, and try to imagine (hypothetically, at least) what would happen if we actually put into practice real Lennonist proselystization. Perhaps if the suicidal death cultists who want to kill us only listened to the song's lyrics, they'd see the evil of their ways:

Imagine there's no Heaven

Hmmm....

Wouldn't that be unimagining Heaven? I mean, isn't Heaven a pretty big part of their existing collective imagination?

I'd hate to think that the ultimate international peace song might be considered blasphemous, and I'm wondering whether my hypothetical goal of converting the imagination of the enemy is even possible in theory, much less in practice.

But I started this, so let's continue to imagine:

It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

As a matter of fact, in my quest to be thorough, I did find an mp3 version [link removed], but I can't vouch for the content of the Arabic lyrics. The post in which I found it claims Algerian musicians were murdered in the 1990s for singing similar lyrics, and credits Algerian performer "Khaled" with great courage for singing it.

If it takes that much courage for a single Muslim performer even to sing the lyrics (assuming he did so in Arabic), I think the song (to say nothing of its ideas) has a long way to go in stopping suicidal death cultists.

Hey, at least I tried.

Why does the song say it's easy?

MORE: Much as I try to be fair, it occurs to me that I may not be the right person to apply "Imagine" principles to the logic of jihad, because I don't agree with the lyrics. But perhaps we could imagine a social experiment in which the true-believing imaginers could actually go into the madrassas and teach the children to imagine that there's no heaven. What better way to find out whether the theory works?

UPDATE: Link to song removed with my apologies for linking. (See comment below.)