New York Times almost gets it

Who knows where this might lead? To actual comprehension?

David Brooks comments on "the fringes" of Islam", whereas it is those fringes that protest can be heard from. Mainstream Islam is silent about the depraved atrocities that took place in Beslan, Southern Russia recently.
But otherwise, this op-ed by David Brooks is good reading.

We've been forced to endure the massacre of children. Whether it's teenagers outside an Israeli disco or students in Beslan, Russia, we've seen kids singled out as special targets.

We should by now have become used to the death cult that is thriving at the fringes of the Muslim world. This is the cult of people who are proud to declare, "You love life, but we love death." This is the cult that sent waves of defenseless children to be mowed down on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war, that trains kindergartners to become bombs, that fetishizes death, that sends people off joyfully to commit mass murder.

This cult attaches itself to a political cause but parasitically strangles it. The death cult has strangled the dream of a Palestinian state. The suicide bombers have not brought peace to Palestine; they've brought reprisals. The car bombers are not pushing the U.S. out of Iraq; they're forcing us to stay longer. The death cult is now strangling the Chechen cause, and will bring not independence but blood.

But that's the idea. Because the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It's about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying.

This last part is essential. There are many people in the world that lead unenviable lives, to use an understatement. Most of these people do not become terrorists. Certainly, none target children, for whatever cause. On the other hand, many Muslim terrorists are not from empoverished backgrounds at all. Quite a few are from rich Arab families, or born, raised and educated in the West.

Somehow, Islam (probably combined with some other lethal factors) enables them to perform such sick acts.

It's about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It's about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism - freedom even from human nature, which says, Love children, and Love life. It's about the joy of sadism and suicide.

We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don't want to stare into this abyss. We don't want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.

This is key. As long as we as a (comparatively) civilizes society REFUSE to accept what we are dealing with, this horror will not go away. It will instead strengthen and grow.

The Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened."

It wasn't a tragedy. It was a carefully planned mass murder operation. And it wasn't Russian authorities who stuffed basketball nets with explosives and shot children in the back as they tried to run away.

Bot is an unbelievable idiot, a prat of the worst kind. The sheer stupidity of this man is equalled only by his lack of humanity and empathy. In fact, until someone shows me his beating heart, I refuse to believe he has one. He is as morally and humanly dead as they come.
Brooks ends on this note:

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation.

He calls this frightening. Perhaps in a sense it is. Practically speaking, there are many ways in which we are more likely to die or be injured than by terrorism. But the straight knowledge that there IS such a cult, adhered to (in different degrees) by millions of people should be sufficient to make us confront it head-on.

Pleas read it all.