Tuesday, May 22, 2007

The compassionate gesture that any father would make

From Michael Gove of The Times (UK)

One other author who has, deservedly, leapt to the top of the bestseller rankings this week is Simon Sebag Montefiore, with Young Stalin, the prequel to Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar ... In the book he discusses a plot by suicide bombers to fly planes into the Tsar’s Winter Palace. It’s a premonition of horrors to come. But the echoes between the totalitarianism that seduced Stalin’s generation and the Wahhabi extremism that bewitched the 9/11 bombers goes beyond that chilling parallel. A pity so few realise that people who appear to be just a bunch of gangsters, in the grip of a crazy ideology, can live out blood-soaked fantasies unless we tackle their ideology at its source.

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