““Yet the sources of their fanaticism are left undefined. The “last night” letter of the terrorists is posted on a wall, but without any English translation. And so the deeper truth that religious fanaticism was the whole of their horrible cause—that, in the last-night letter, God is cited a hundred and twenty-one times—is elided. It is disquieting to be reminded that the women-in-paradise promise, which sophisticates have widely thought to be a claim made by Western propagandists, is right there, too. The terrorists did not hate us for our freedom; they hated us for our lack of faith. (There’s a complicated sense in which the two go together, but they weren’t capable of making the complicated case.) Their godliness does not exhaust the meanings of religion, any more than Pol Pot’s atheism exhausts the meanings of doubt. But it is a central fact of the occasion, not illuminated by being ignored.””
