Facing up to unholy terror.

RUSSIA; SPAIN; ISRAEL

The author comments on terrorism, in the wake of a terrorist attack in Beslan, Russia. The moral limits of our world have been stretched to the breaking point. The political ideologies of terror, armed with a religious warrant, have been defining our limits of tolerance, our morality itself, downward. The Russians now claim a 9/11 of their own; Spain had been given a signal day of mourning six months earlier, when commuter trains were blown apart by bombs assembled by Arab drifters and jihadists. In truth, Israel had been the first battleground in this ongoing war between civilized life and terror. We don't know when this new terribleness was ushered into the world of Islam. But we know that at its roots lie the forces of envy and resentment, an attraction to the emancipated ways of an encircling global culture that Muslims can neither master nor reject. In our innocence, we think that a battle ought to be waged for Muslim hearts and minds, that perhaps if we refined or amplified our message, this hate would be driven away. It is in this spirit that the 9/11 commission recently recommended the launching of a campaign of public diplomacy in the Muslim world. But this is illusion. For at heart, this war for Islam is one for Muslims to fight. It is for them to recover their faith from the purveyors of terror.