Sometimes the Times just gets it, gets it so right that it becomes once again the institutional hero of my younger years. (Sorry, friends at the New York Sun.) In any case, on Friday past on the front page of the Times, there appeared a story titled, "In Jihadist Heaven, a Goal: To Kill and Die in Iraq." The intricate narrative was written by Souad Mekhennet and Michael Moss. Here's how it starts: "Zarqa, Jordan - Abu Ibrahim considers his dead friends the lucky ones." And why? "Zarqa has been known as a cradle of militancy since the beginning of the war in Iraq. It was the home of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the insurgent group Al Qaeada in Mesopotamia, who was killed last summer. Today, it is a breeding ground for would-be jihadists...Local imams...[cite] verses from the Koran to justify killing civilians." This town specializes in the suicide-bombing of innocents. In some neighboring towns, the men work at making bricks; in others, they press olives. In this one, it's killing that is their business. As, alas, in other cities, town and villages throughout the Arab and Muslim orbits. Here, in a quotation from Abu Ibrahim, is the credo, so to speak: "I want to spread the roots of God on this earth and free the land of occupiers. I don't love anything in this world. What I care about is fighting." I read this article just after I had finished an extremely rewarding book by Bernard Rougier, Everyday Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam Among Palestinians in Lebanon (Harvard University Press). It is a close study of a dense Palestinian refugee camp, Ain al-Helweh. We've known for some time that the refugee towns--they are not really camps as we know them anywhere else--in Lebanon are now centers of Islamic fanaticism. No refugee problem has gone so untamed and so unresolved as the Palestinian one. Tens of millions of other refugees have been absorbed in their "exiles" in the post-war world. But these refugees--now into the fourth generation, making them not exactly refugees--are living in the Arab world where the whole notion of country and nation is still fresh and almost without roots, where boundaries are artificial and often unmarked and unguarded. Anyway, Ain al-Hilweh (with three or four generations of rootless people who have paradoxically rooted themselves in a harsh but indolent life in Lebanon) is now a center, sort of like Zarqa, of revenge. Oh yes, they hate Israel and they hate the United States, too. But, as in Zarqa, their revenge is really directed against the Shi'a. The Shi'a have humiliated them, marginalized them (sometimes for good and sufficient reasons), disdained them. This is the tawdry story of their disgust with themselves. Zarqa and Ain al-Hilweh are auguries of the world-to-come in the Arab world, not in eternity. But tomorrow, and already today.