Abstract

Blowing people up in the shopping centre of Warrington or of a provincial Irish town, or in a Jerusalem restaurant, flying planes full of people into heavily populated skyscrapers or centres of government, massacring defenceless villagers simply because they belong to another tribe. These are certainly hate crimes, that is, crimes fuelled by hate. For most of us the hate and the crime, when we watch such events unfold, are unimaginable. We cannot imagine what it is which can drive people in our time to do such things.Terrorism must be outlawed once and for all, we think, surely rightly. Yet we are unsure how to do it. But there is a vague feeling that some of this terrorism arises from violent differences of belief, and from people being driven by their beliefs to kill those of other beliefs. But again, as liberals, we do not know how to handle this thought.