Perhaps the events of the past few days might have convinced people of the nature of the evil we face, but somehow I doubt it.
Three years after 9/11, the victim-blame game goes on. Somehow, runs the mantra, the Russians brought this on themselves: this is the price they're paying for all that Communist and post-Communist oppression of the decent, peace-loving Chechens. Why can't the Chechens just have their freedom? If they do, that'll be the end of it.
No it won't. The Chechens had largely been given their freedom, but then terrorist groups used free Chechnya as an operational base to launch a terrorist campaign against Moscow, in which hundreds died. Nor is the inept and brutal conduct of the Russian forces during two wars all that relevant, because provocation is not the issue.
Fundamentalists - supported by their cretinous, whinging groupies in the West - will happily seize on whatever available pretexts to justify their terrorist deeds; but those terrorist deeds would happen anyway, regardless of demands, concessions or historic wrongs.
Evil such as the world has not seen in all its melancholy chronicles is now abroad. Not even the Nazis joyfully disclosed their vilest deeds; Pol Pot's killers did their work in secret. Yet Islamic fundamentalists celebrate their bleakest and most terrible atrocities by videoing them and broadcasting to the world. These people inhabit a diabolical landscape in which there is no shame for any deed, no taboo attached to murder: their obsession with the diseased trinity of jihad, martyrdom and lurid publicity has created the most morally depraved ethos that mankind has ever known.
Judge them by their deeds. In the course of just over a week, a dozen or so recently arrived Nepalese construction workers in Iraq, wretched and helpless illiterates, are butchered in the coldest of cold blood, the first of them having his throat cut while his killers gleefully video their deed. In Israel, 16 Jews are butchered by suicide bombers. In Russia, other suicide bombers slaughter passengers at the Moscow metro and blow two passenger airliners out of the skies. In Sudan, Janjaweed killers rape and murder at will, with the active support of the government in Khartoum. And finally, a week before the third anniversary of 9/11, we have the Herodian massacre of the innocents, in full view of the world's cameras.
No, to be sure, there is no co-ordinating mastermind behind all this - nor does there need to be. Islami-Nazi terrorists merely have a remit to choose a target of infidels: there are now no limitations on what kind of infidel that they can choose.
Children were bayoneted by their captors in School Number One in Beslan long before the siege ended; and since the deeds in Ossetia were hitherto unimaginable, we can only conclude that we have not come close to the nadir, which must remain beyond the reach of our own wretchedly limited imaginations, just as 9/11 was a mere three years and many thousands of lives ago.
There is one single issue here, and the Western democracies have to confront it. As Abdel Rahman a-Rashed said in the pan-Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat over the weekend: "It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims." Across the world within Muslim communities, a fundamentalist carcinogen has corrupted much of Islamic culture, the result now being evident in every continent and in half a dozen capitals. What has been the response of the target communities?
In Spain, terrorists murdered 200 civilians, and the Spanish responded by electing a government of quislings, who promptly changed Spanish foreign policy to suit terrorist requirements. In Britain Channel 4 last Thursday showed a drama-documentary about terrorists responsible for 9/11. It has been highly praised in some quarters, but what troubles me about it is its impact on the 1,200 British Muslims who have already been trained in terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Would that programme have dissuaded any of those young men from engaging in martyrdom missions? Unlikely. Would it - albeit unintentionally - have had the opposite effect? Very possibly.
This is frivolous and self-indulgent, a moral equivalence bordering on the decadent. The Western world is being confronted with the naked steel of jihad; this is no time for thoughtful, humanitarian musings about terrorists having feelings too. For they don't want emotional sympathy or empathy: they merely want to kill us. Only a society which no longer wishes to protect itself at the very height of war presents dramatic projections of the human hearts and minds of its sworn enemies. This is the equivalent of the BBC presenting a docu-drama in 1944 about the basic decency, courage and single-mindedness of the SS.
The year is 2004, and we have had three years of global terrorism, just as President Bush predicted. It is infantile to present those three years as a product of US policy, for terrorists will always target the US, wherever it goes, as in Iraq at the moment. But the US was not the target in Bali, Sudan, North Ossetia, Moscow, Israel. Moreover, doing nothing will not mean you will be spared, any more than doing nothing spared anyone the attentions of the Third Reich. In the next three years, terrorism will mutate and find fresh expressions of evil - giving Channel 4 just enough time to make a deeply moving docu-drama of the real human feelings and motivations of the child-killers of Beslan School Number One.