Vorlon Whispers

The repeated imagery of hostages taken, their pleas broadcast internationally on Al Jazeera so that we can fully appreciate their humanity, then videos released in which we can watch the victim scream out his horror, while a hooded man uses a knife to saw through his neck, and other hooded men stand by, shouting, "Allahu akhbar," which means, "God is great!"

Or the imagery of the little Christian children in Beslan, trying to run away from the school in which they were held captive, in which they had drunk their own pee to survive dehydration, running from the bombs set off in the gymnasium, some running with their mothers, and being machine-gunned in the back, by more men shouting, "Allahu akhbar!"

Passenger planes, themselves full of the living, flown into office towers in the middle of Manhattan; trapped people leaping while the buildings burned, from the highest floors when the heat became unbearable; the sound captures of those bodies landing: thud, thud, thud.

Buses full of women and children and old men, blown to pieces by suicide bombers in Jerusalem. The police forensic specialists, and the Orthodox devouts, using tweezers to gather the particles of Jewish flesh, stuck to the surrounding pavement.

Successive stills from a security camera above a railway platform in Madrid, showing three successive flashes, and in the glare, the last nanoseconds in the lives of hundreds of commuters in the trains and on the platforms.

Views through the rubble of a nightclub in Denpassar, crowded with hundreds of Australian tourists, pulverized by similarly timed explosions. Blood, broken glass.

And the many other scenes, after car-bombs and truck-bombs and jelly-bombs and jacket-bombs: in Karachi, in Istanbul, in Riyadh, in Tunis, in Kabul, in the courtyards of little Assyrian churches in rural Iraq, or on the sidewalks in front of their small shops in Basra. Not random, not spontaneous combustion, but aimed, in each case at the foreigners, the Christians, the Jews, the Sufis, the Yankees, their "accomplices".

And the chant from supportive demonstrators, taking to the streets after such incidents in places so diverse as Brooklyn, Rotterdam, Paris, Cairo, Ramallah, Tehran, San'a, Lahore: "Allahu akhbar, Allahu akhbar!"

This is an aside, but I should like to mention that I am proud to work for a Canadian media organization that has been criticized for inserting the word "terrorists" into wire copy, to characterize the perpetrators of such deeds; to work with editors who are capable of refusing the euphemisms that are offered in the wire-service style books. "Terrorists" is an objective description of a person who commits an act of carnage in order to advance a cause; words like "militant", or "radical", or "activist", or "rebel", or "gunman", or "captor", or "guerrilla", or "commando" ("membres du commando" in Agence France-Presse), are moral evasions.

According to Reuters' oft-repeated dictum: "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Yes, and one man's Nazi is another man's saviour of Germany, and Stalin was my garrulous Uncle Joe. It is an outrageous moral evasion to take the criminal at his word, and I am proud of every person in my trade who refuses to play along.

Letters and e-mails tend to come in thematic clumps; I noticed several like the one I first quoted in the last few weeks, and they suggest to me the world is getting tired. What the world does, when the world gets tired, is beyond my prognostication, but in answer to the question that was posed:

No. It does not drive me nuts. I have no more right to allow it to drive me nuts, than I have the right to ignore it: for an evil on the scale of what we face demands a coherent response. This, in turn, requires a clear head.

The purpose of terrorism is to terrify: to drive us nuts, to leave us incoherent, to make us run away. To spread fear and confusion, feeding upon each other. To make, for instance, the American electorate think: "O dear, Iraq is a nightmare, we had better get out right away."