I tear my hair out when I read something like this New York Times op-ed by David Brooks, about the school massacre in Russia:

Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible targets for their rage....

This death cult [i.e., all Islamic terrorists who kill civilians, lumped into one undifferentiated mass] has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.

Brooks is saying that when brutal people commit brutal acts, it is moral relativism, if not moral bankruptcy, to respond to savagery with rational thought -- to think about our response, to ask ourselves what we can actually do. He believes we must instead turn our brains off and chant EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL until we are worked up into a lather and are prepared to ...

... to what? Brooks never answers -- although maybe he gave his answer in a piece he wrote last November, when it was becoming clear even to obtuse right-wingers that the Iraqi insurgency wasn't going away:

History shows that Americans are willing to make sacrifices. The real doubts come when we see ourselves inflicting them. What will happen to the national mood when the news programs start broadcasting images of the brutal measures our own troops will have to adopt? Inevitably, there will be atrocities that will cause many good-hearted people to defect from the cause. They will be tempted to have us retreat into the paradise of our own innocence....

The president will have to remind us that we live in a fallen world, that we have to take morally hazardous action if we are to defeat the killers who confront us. It is our responsibility to not walk away. It is our responsibility to recognize the dark realities of human nature, while still preserving our idealistic faith in a better Middle East.

In other words, the apparent point of chanting EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL when we see Islamists committing atrocities is to steel ourselves for atrocities of our own.

*****

Brooks singles out a Boston Globe editorial for special opprobrium. It's not clear which of two Globe editorials on the massacre strikes his as "glid[ing] over the perpetrators of this act" -- is it the one that begins like this?

It would be hard to imagine a more heartless crime than to take children hostage and threaten them with death if demands are not met.

Or is it the one that begins like this?

Yesterday's horrific end of the hostage crisis in Russia's Republic of North Ossetia, with a death toll in three figures, illustrates above all the hostage-takers' pitiless cruelty.

And here's some of the "rage" and "hate" directed at the "comprehensible" Russian government in that first Globe editorial:

Responses to the hostage-taking must be of two kinds: for the short term, a painstaking effort to resolve the crisis without further harm to the hostages, and for the long term, a recognition that it is in the interest of Russians and Chechens to find a political solution of the horrific conflict in Chechnya.

... the first obligation of a government exercising popular sovereignty should be to protect the lives of its citizens. In 2002, when Russian security forces sought to rescue hostages by pumping lethal gas into a Moscow theater without having the proper antidotes at the site, they ended up killing 129 hostages and making the Kremlin look callous about Russian lives. Putin ought to be doing everything he can to avoid a repeat of the tragic denouement at the Moscow theater....

Putin should seek a political solution in Chechnya not in response to terrorism but for the sake of justice for Russians as well as Chechens. 

And here's the enraged, hate-filled follow-up:

Even if the official Russian version of what happened yesterday at the school in Breslan, North Ossetia, is taken at face value, it appears the Russian forces managing the siege and the rescue operation were guilty of blunders that cost many lives. Inexplicably, they failed to establish a tight security cordon around the school where the hostages were being held. They also neglected to keep civilians at a safe distance from the site of the standoff.

Since there was no proper security perimeter, many of the terrorists were able to hide among fleeing hostages and escape into the town of Breslan after an explosion collapsed part of the gymnasium and Russian forces exchanged fire with a cluster of hostage-takers inside the school.

Russian authorities said the storming of the school was not planned and had been forced on them by the explosion. Whether or not this version of events is true, those authorities ought to have been prepared for an eventual assault on the hostage-takers.

Talking of concrete measures that rational people might take to save innocent lives -- how appallingly hateful!