Now I have to deal with Lee Hamilton and Dexter Filkins posing as Middle East experts: the former because of a long record of supporting Israel (while criticizing it in private), and the other because of embedded experience in the Middle East. "They recall Mr. Filkins’s sketch of Kabul in 1998, where, at a public execution, he hears over loudspeakers: “In revenge there is life.” This maxim is as foreign to American ears as the concept of a forever war." There is no such saying: it is an Arabic verse from the Qur'an :
وَلَكُمْ فِي الْقِصَاصِ حَيَاةٌ يَاْ أُولِيْ الأَلْبَابِ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَتَّقُونَ (179)"
Often people in Arabic mispronounce the word Qisas as "qasas" which has a different etymology. The word does not translate as "revenge" as Mr. Hamilton and Filkins have indicated, or as the kooky Taliban may have wanted to imply. the word means (in its origin) to "follow the previous steps", or "set an example". The full ayat is to be translated as "And you shall have a new life in meting out justice..." And why do experts, writers, and laypeople in the West insist that revenge is an exceptional, unique quality that only people in the Middle East posess? The U.S. invaded two countries after Sep. 11 IN REVENGE.