Other things -- like a White House sex scandal and the Nasdaq -- preoccupied us when he called us ''the most filthy sort of human beings'' and a ''lowly people.'' It didn't register when he said it was a sacred duty for Muslims to kill American civilians or praised young bombers for giving their lives to this ''killing and neck smiting.'' And beyond the caves of Afghanistan, few seemed to be listening anyhow -- as far as we knew or cared. .
Wondering in the days after Sept. 11 how self-annihilation had gone from being a tactic for spreading gory mayhem on a local scale to a weapon of mass destruction, I started reading up on kamikazes and the Black Tigers of the Tamil movement in Sri Lanka. It seemed useful to recall that it wasn't only extremist Muslims who blew themselves up to inflict damage on an enemy. But the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombers still seemed to me different from any precursors: in their self-discipline, their ability to coordinate their efforts over long distances and many months, in the cold power they silently lorded over their fellow passengers as they waited to blow them -- and themselves -- to bits. They weren't around to be asked about their apocalyptic vision and motives, but they had plenty of contemporaries. As a reborn reporter, my instinct was to visit several Muslim centers -- Gaza, Cairo, Hamburg -- throwing myself into as many intense conversations as I could on the subject of suicide bombings, martyrdom and Sept. 11, especially with men in their 20's and 30's who might have given some thought to what moved their generational cohorts to take this path and stay on it till its calamitous end. I did not realize how different the perspectives could be in each place. .
Gaza .
I picked Gaza as a place to start for the simple reason that it has a well-established production line for suicide bombers (though, conspicuously, there were no Palestinians on the Sept.
