Hamas brags about using innocents as human shields:

"For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry

In which excel the women and all the people of this land:

The older people excel, the jihadists excel

And the children excel

Consequently, [the Palestinians] created a human shield of women, children

Older people and jihadists

Against the Zionist bombing machine

That is telling the Zionist enemy

We want death just as much as you desire life."

"We love death as much as you love life" is an ancient Islamic boast.

And a deeply evil one.

It makes you wonder how exactly Islamists distinguish themselves in their own minds from followers of the devil himself.

If someone deliberately set out to fill the world with the purest evil he could find, wouldn't the effort prominently feature minions who take delight in bringing about the deaths of innocent men, women and children -- including their own?  Wouldn't some of the proudest moments of these soldiers of hell include incidents like "Beslan" and "9/11" and "Mumbai" and "Nicholas Berg" and "heads found in fruit boxes all over Baghdad" and "suicide bomb detonated in pizza parlor" and "Lockerbie," just to name a few of the many?

If Islamists indeed love death as much as humans with common decency love life, I'm thinking we should be able to find some common ground.

All those who desire death can proceed directly to their premature, violent self-destruction.  The rest of us can go with the "life" thing, crazy as that seems.

What Islamists need, of course, is to find redemption. They need a religion of love, not hate. They need a religion of joy and true peace. They literally have no idea of what they are missing.

But where do you even begin, with a culture that firmly believes that a day spent slaughtering innocents is a good day's work?

Cross-posted at GINA COBB