Violence is a contagion that with its spread and inevitable escalation creates its own perverse logic; it’s the logic of terrorism. We’ve all wondered how a terrorist can inflict such murderous cruelty on innocent people. But the terrorist has his logic. The terrorist will defend his actions by citing past abuses his people have suffered, and in the mind of the terrorist his means are justified by the ends he believes will be good. The terrorist always sees his actions as a response to previous violence and perceives his actions as primarily defensive. René Girard says, “the fact that no one
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