Jihad

Islamist thugs are murdering Buddhist monks in Thailand.
It’s not because Buddhist monks are “colonialist oppressors,” nor is it because Buddhists drive the engine of corporate globalization. And it’s not because Thailand is a superpower that deserves to be brought to heel. Thai Buddhists don’t need to ask “why do they hate us?” It’s because Buddhists are “infidels.” And that’s that.
As Omer Bartov put it this week in The New Republic:

[W]e still do not seem to have learned a simple crucial lesson that Hitler taught us more definitively than anyone else in history: some people, some regimes, some ideologies, some political programs, and, yes, some religious groups, must be taken at their word. Some people mean what they say, and say what they will do, and do what they said.

(Via Exit Zero.)