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structure of the Koran and seeksto explain why it has such an effect on two billion people in the world.
            O ’ REILLY : UNC never gave incoming freshmen a book on the Bible to read.
            KIRKPATRICK : We assume that most people coming to the University of North Carolina are already familiar with both the Old and New Testaments.
            O ’ REILLY : But if you did do that, there’d be an outcry all over the country.
    The professor had no answer for that. Soon after, under pressure from the North Carolina legislature, UNC dropped the book from its required reading list. Approaching the Koran became an optional reading assignment, as it should have been all along. I’ll go one step further: If the book was mandatory reading in a theology or history class, I would have had no problem with it. But forcing all incoming freshmen to read any book praising a specific religion does violate the mandate that public universities have to live by in order to receive tax dollars.
    There’s an interesting side note to the controversy. As I said, the ACLU was MIA during the UNC brouhaha (I love all those initials). Also, most other media did not cover the story as aggressively as we did. As part of our analysis, we rejected the idea that reading the Koran book would help us get to know the world that the 9/11 killers inhabited.Number one, I don’t think the revelations of the Prophet Muhammad have anything to do with homicide and terrorism. And second, I reject the argument that you have to digest a book of poetry and religious interpretation in order to “know” your enemy.
    I said this to Professor Kirkpatrick: “[As a UNC freshman] I wouldn’t read the book. And if I were going to the university in 1941, I wouldn’t have read Mein Kampf either.”
    Kirkpatrick asked why. “Because it’s tripe,” I answered.
    The next day a number of Muslim websites wrote that I compared the Koran to Mein Kampf , the usual vile propaganda some of these sites spew out. What can you do?

    Here’s the key question: How can terrorism exist if rational human beings know that murdering innocent women and children is the most cowardly act on earth? The answer is complicated, but, in the end, it comes down to untreatable mental illness. Osama bin Laden and his crew are not discernibly different from Hitler, Mao, or Stalin. Shrinks define them as sociopaths, but that is a clinical term for the hospital or classroom. In the everyday world, these men are simply evil and must be isolated or killed so that innocent people can be protected from their treachery.
    But, Lord, there are so many of these barbarians. There are millions of human beings who have killed or will kill people because they believe some god or the führer or whoever has ordered that. If you still resist the idea of active evilin the world today, just picture the nineteen 9/11 hijackers killing three thousand people for absolutely no reason. Time after time, history has shown us that this kind of murderous conduct is part of the human condition. But still, some on this earth refuse to believe that evil exists and that terrorism is the epitome of it. Getting people to understand that truth is central to the struggle of our times.
    Bottom line: Terrorist killers and those who support them are evil. Period.

State of Yourself
“ ’Tis himself!”
—Traditional greeting when a flamboyant
individual enters an Irish pub

SIX

WHAT’S MINE?
    Americans Just Want More Stuff, and That’s a Problem
    And I’m looking in the mirror here.…
Here’s something that really surprises me: The more stuff I have, the more stuff I want. And so I looked around and saw that everyone else was the same way. It was not until I had a few things that I noticed how this works. The material stuff is addicting!
Remembering my parents, I try to fight against the “stuff addiction.” I refuse to buy jewelry or trinkets. I don’t need expensive toys like Jet Skis or