CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, a Brit who has not gone soft in the war on terror, wonders why the New York Times is reluctant to call terrorists terrorists?

The Bin Ladenists did have a sort of “governing program,” expressed in part by their Taliban allies and patrons. This in turn reflected a “unified ideology.” It can be quite easily summarized: the return of the Ottoman Empire under a caliphate and a return to the desert religious purity of the seventh century (not quite the same things, but that’s not our fault). In the meantime, anyway, war to the end against Jews, Hindus, Christians, unbelievers, and Shiites. None of the “experts” quoted in the article appeared to have remembered these essentials of the al-Qaida program, but had they done so, they might not be so astounded at the promiscuous way in which the Iraqi gangsters pump out toxic anti-Semitism, slaughter Nepalese and other Asian guest-workers on video and gloat over the death of Hindus, burn out and blow up the Iraqi Christian minority, kidnap any Westerner who catches their eye, and regularly inflict massacres and bombings on Shiite mosques, funerals, and assemblies. . . .

The Bin Laden and Zarqawi organizations, and their co-thinkers in other countries, have gone to great pains to announce, on several occasions, that they will win because they love death, while their enemies are so soft and degenerate that they prefer life. Are we supposed to think that they were just boasting when they said this? Their actions demonstrate it every day, and there are burned-out school buses and clinics and hospitals to prove it, as well as mosques (the incineration of which one might think to be a better subject for Islamic protest than a possibly desecrated Quran, in a prison where every inmate is automatically issued with one.)

You’d think so, wouldn’t you?

UPDATE: Reader Barry Dauphin emails:

Yes, Hitchens actually takes bin Laden and Zarqawi seriously. He might revile them but he shows them enough respect to listen to their words. Anyone who reads the bin Laden fatwas knows what he’s up to; it’s all there. Either the NYT and others haven’t really read them or they think “he can’t be serious.” And today Krugman is bloviating that the war in Iraq is Vietnam redux and is making us weaker day by day. And the NYT actually wants people to pay for that crap?

There’s a subscriber born every minute.