A friend writes: "I find that reading the news these days, with hostage beheadings front and centre, is quite depressing. You have to keep up with all of the horrors; doesn't it drive you nuts?"

The repeated imagery of hostages taken, their pleas broadcast internationally on Al Jazeera so that we can fully appreciate their humanity, then videos released in which we can watch the victim scream out his horror, while a hooded man uses a knife to saw through his neck, and other hooded men stand by, shouting, "Allahu akhbar," which means, "God is great!"

Or the imagery of the little Christian children in Beslan, trying to run away from the school in which they were held captive, in which they had drunk their own pee to survive dehydration, running from the bombs set off in the gymnasium, some running with their mothers, and being machine-gunned in the back, by more men shouting, "Allahu akhbar!"