A friend sent me the following.

This is our dilemma. We face an implacable enemy who wants to destroy and subject us. The enemy openly proclaims his beliefs, even acts savagely on those beliefs, and we don’t want to know that we have enemies like that. Surely, as people say so often to the Israelis, if you sat down with Hamas, I’m sure you could work something out.

We want to be nice; we don’t want to be mean. And we end up being nice to the mean and mean to the nice. If we understand that we face an apocalyptic enemy who views the “other,” the infidel, as evil that must be destroyed, then we can’t keep telling ourselves that money and economic programs will solve the problem.

As a colleague said to me once about Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, “I wouldn’t have that on my shelf.” She was a candidate for membership in “Historians against War along with the colleague who told me that if the Palestinians did suicide bombing, it’s because “what choice did they have.” In theory, an end to war is a messianic fantasy, not a scholarly discipline; in practice it means activists mistake the worst imperialists for allies in an anti-imperial movement.

More here at The Augean Stables