"we feel repulsed by the very idea that they may have an explanation beyond ... insanity"



Which is only to say that we wish to blame the victim and get away with it. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, US Neocons needed another issue to keep diverting the US Economy into the US Military Budget; I have no reason to believe that "9/11" was anything more than a US-directed hoax to create a new enemy, and the US has been baiting the Arabs ever since. What we see is the chickens coming home to roost, where our victims are now fulfilling the prophecies we made about them, and because we've given them no other choice.



While my immediate reaction to the attack on Free Speech maligning Mohammed is that terror upon the homelands of the perpetrators would be justified, there is no denying that we've given those people no starting point other than to be horrible monsters to begin with, it's all our populations have ever heard about them from our governments. If you want to feel good about torturing someone, you have to dehumanize them first, and that's all the West has done to those people, for decades now. I think it's about time for the common folk to demand the West get out of their lands and start intimating that we can afford them a little self-determination for a change, no more or less than the rest of us would want in their situation. If we insist they're inhuman, then we have no business holding them to "human" standards, or easier, "what goes around comes around."



I would like to see Islam abandoned, in the same way that I would like to know that Christianity has been abandoned; God has nothing to do with our killing each other; we do that. And that would happen, if we normalized (human) relations with the Islamists. It might take longer than we'd like, but after all, if we've retarded the socioeconomic development of those various countries to suit ourselves, the historical delay on their part is our fault - leading back to:



You don't blame someone for doing what you've left them no choice but to do. As soon as the glee of US Air Force pilots at bombing yet another Afghani wedding party is punished for the world to see, we might be on the way to recovering our own humanity, and have no business complaining of "their" lack of humanity until we face the lack of our own.



So, I think I have agreed with Professor Sachs, thank you.