Creepy Quote of the Day

Lord, it's almost a theme for today: Stuff That Creeps Me Out.

I'm reading a book right now called Terror In the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, by Jessica Stern (who is apparently a noted terrorism expert -- I'd not heard of her before I checked the book out of the library). Stern's goal in the book is to interview the actual terrorists: not experts, not law enforcement and government officials, but the terrorists themselves. I'm barely one-fifth into the book, so I can't report yet on if it's a good book or if I agree with Stern's conclusions, because I haven't reached any. But I've just reached a place where Stern interviews one of the leaders of Hamas.

While I've long understood that terrorists view their activities as exercises of war and not murder, I suppose that I also believed that, on some level, the terrorists still knew that the innocents they attack are actually innocents, the act of attacking whom is part of some strategy, if a monstrously evil one. It turns out that I was wrong in that belief, because this is what the Hamas leader says:

"There are no civilians in Israel, because every citizen is required to serve in the Army. We are war with Israel."

They don't attack innocents because they think that doing so will help them achieve their military goal. Attacking civilians IS their military goal.