This was the headline in the Jerusalem Post which, one might think, wouldn't be so finicky about the source of the attack on the Moscow-St. Petersburg railway that left at least 26 dead, about 100 wounded and 18 missing, presumed also gone to their maker. This mass homicide was a massacre, and I assume it was carried out by...well, take your choice. (Last week, you'll recall, I anointed Opus Dei as the culprits for an enormity in Afghanistan.) So this time maybe it was Hasidim gone on pilgrimage to the Russian grave of their wonder rabbi or, more likely, some "Jewish settlers" from Gilo on a journey of ideological vengeance. Alright, you see how utterly preposterous this is.
This weekend last year there were somewhere close to 200 murdered in Mumbai and more than 300 maimed and disfigured. The Times and every other "responsible" news source were coy for days about who carried out this atrocity. But you knew and I knew. Their coyness was not responsibility. It was cowardice.
And so in the Philippines over the last days where every conceivable group of villains is Muslim and defines itself as Muslim the press still can barely bring itself to utter the word. One top suspect was even wearing a kaffiyeh. OK, this is surely not evidence. Neither is the fact that most of the dead women had their sexual organs mutilated. Nor the tidbit that perhaps two dozen of the 57 murdered were journalists, as if their killing would obliterate the evidence. But all of this speaks to a wanton disease in Islam. Only a rising by and of the truly outraged of Islam can stop these daily rampages done in the name of the prophet.
One thing is for sure: the banning of minarets, as announced a few minutes ago after a plebiscite in Switzerland, is precisely the wrong direction.