I ran across this link the other day shortly after seeing coverage of the crisis in Darfur on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The upshot is that tens of thousands of “demonstrators say they are willing to die in a holy war if the international community sends troops to Darfur.” What’s happening in Darfur is systematic genocide (ethnic cleansing) perpetrated by Arab militias known as the Janjaweed.

Now we have these demonstrators promising holy war if there’s any international intervention in this festering human rights crisis. Things like this cause radical Islam to lose the last scraps of any moral legitimacy that might have been clinging to it. “Don’t bother us while we’re killing our countrymen or we’ll come kill you too.”

For me, it’s impossible by this time not to view radical Islam as a kind of contagious mental illness that over-stimulates the hypothalamus and depresses frontal cortex activity, turning its victims into murdering zombies. When they state their goals, they’re in line with what the linked article highlights: they want to kill all of their opponents, and their opponents are anyone who isn’t already infected. They want to do it systematically. They want to do it soon. They can’t be reasoned with.

What can be done about it? I don’t know. I’m not sure how one wages a campaign against a spreading global mental illness. Maybe it will ravage the Middle East for an indefinite period of time like the way that AIDS is destroying Africa.

Actually—I don’t know why I’m even using the future tense. This is what’s happening. It probably took root sometime in the mid-seventies and, like AIDS in Africa, raging along with no end in sight. I think it’s the 21st century’s Nazism. Look how that finally turned out and what it cost to “cure” it.