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Of these, Burleigh finds the Salafist-Jihadists to be the vilest and most degraded, not least because they are, like the Nazis before them, motivated by "sheer racial hatred." Like ideological terrorists who have no qualms about bombing day care centers (Timothy McVeigh), or Palestinian suicide bombers who murder school children, the Jihadists are indifferent to the slaughter of innocents.

Though unlike other nationalist groups -- e.g., the Fenians who were interested only in their little Emerald Island -- today's jihadists seek to impose on the entire world a Mohammedan utopia that most of us would find worse than hell itself.

APPARENTLY NO TERRORIST act is too despicable to deserve the censure of the far left. Gore Vidal, you may recall, saw McVeigh, whose victims included 19 children in a day care center, and three unborn children, as a heroic freedom fighter. Professor Ward Churchill declared that the World Trade Center dead deserved what they got.

Churchill had much in common with Jean-Paul Sartre, who apologized for the RAF's Andreas Baader, the drug-addict and playboy, whose hatred of consumerism caused him to firebomb German department stores. Singer Marianne Faithfull dedicated her song/album Broken English to Baader's co-hort Ulrike Meinhof. While terrorists do not expect to win the hearts and minds of the average Westerner, they can always count on winning the hearts of celebrities and leftist intellectuals and the rest of the so-called "human rights mafia."

Burleigh concedes that the tactic of terror has "never amounted to more than an irritant," and that the good news is that the present irritant, i.e., Salafist-Jihadism, like all past forms of terror, will soon pass into history.

We can help that passing, he says, by showing Muslims that the West is much more than Internet porn and girls going wild, that is by promoting our incredibly rich culture (yes, this may mean increased funding for the National Endowment of the Arts, which will be considerably cheaper than fighter jets.) This will mean closely monitoring mosques, and ensuring that imams are encouraging young Muslims to work and start families, and not preaching jihad.

I would be more hopeful for a quick end to Salafist-Jihadism if I could but find in the Koran a single passage similar to "turn the other cheek," or "love one another as I have loved you." However that good book is oddly silent on loving one's enemies.

Indeed whenever the word "love" is used, it is applied in a negative sense, as in it is wrong to love this life, more than the next. We are left with an anachronistic and patriarchal religion that makes the Amish look in vogue.

That was Burleigh's good news. The bad news is that terrorism in general shall not perish from this earth. Like some particularly stubborn form of cancer it may go into remission, but it shall always return, perhaps in another place and another form. But have no doubt, it shall return.

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