We are now, as a generation, witnesses to the intra-Muslim wars. With terror against ordinary people as chosen weaponry, our age should be known as the era of Islamic fratricide, except that it was probably a mistake ever to see deeply-riven sectarian Muslims thinking each other brothers. And they certainly do not think themselves sisters. But they do learn from each other. This morning, waking early to the Times, there was the news of the Taliban suicide bomber who took the lives of "at least 24 people" in Afghanistan. An Associated Press report had the earliest death toll at 35, calling the event "the deadliest insurgent attack in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001." 22 of the dead were police so the Taliban can now claim this as victory in a great strategic battle. The Times reporter, Barry Bearak, observed that, "the Taliban are employing tactics similar to those used by insurgents in Iraq." Ah, that aseptic word, "insurgents." The day before another Taliban suicide bomber killed 10 people, one a Dutch soldier and five children. Here is how a witness described the latest death happening: "Those in the front seats [of the bus], their bodies were very ripped apart. Half of their heads were gone and there was brain matter all over. Very few of those inside survived. I could help those able to walk." Or about a dead brother: "I barely recognized his corpse...I recognized his belt, but his eyes and forehead were gone." Frankly, these Afghanis, all of them, would have been better left with the declining Soviet empire. In Iraq, the killing continues, though in the last days it has been not as spectacular as before, a dozen here, a half dozen there, and lots of close-up murders and beheadings in the night. What did happen this week was a tit-for-tat bombing of mosques. Two minarets were blown off a sacred Shi'a site. In revenge, Shi'a terrorists blew up and completely destroyed a Sunni mosque, the Talal Bin al-Zubair in Basra. These are the symbols. But the pious people who pray in these mosques are the real targets and the real victims. In Lebanon, fanatic Sunni Palestinians, also terrorists, named Sword of Something or other, were in pitched battle with the (largely Shi'a but also Maronite) army. No one knows how many were killed. No one. Human Rights Watch did finally lodge a protest, as did Amnesty International...but, well, with little passion. This was not, after all, the battle of Jenin where the U.N. manufactured (with, as I recall, the helpful testimony of HRW and AI) a massacre that it had to admit, long after, had not happened. But nowhere is the war-torn and war-ravaged picture of the Arabs more clear than among the Palestinians, those who were always pointed to as the best educated and most civilized of the Arabs. When Fatah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad and all of the dozens of minor gangster grouplets were just killing Jews, Israelis, there was the excuse of the Naqba, the refugees, the settlements. On and on over six decades, and really a century. But now they are killing each other. The cause that was imagined to unite all Islam--against the United States and Israel and the West--was more fractious, more bloody, more hand-to-hand brutal and as cruel as their cousins as in other lands. And more primitive. It was in Gaza, after all, only last week (and in the West Bank before) that we saw with stark clarity how clans and tribes and families were still decisive units of Palestinian politics on the ground, both in life and in death. How tenacious was their hold on people of the intimate blood, and how facile their aging leaders's capacity to go from one side to another, sending their young to fight alongside those they had only yesterday tried to kill. "At a stroke, the older members of families...were replaced" by the younger moderns, writes Rashid Khalidi in his, alas, pathetically titled but still informative Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. And the Palestinian case is not an instance of the ongoing Sunni-Shi'a bloodlust. There is not a Shi'a in "Palestine," probably not one. This is a great human tragedy. But it is also pathetic. And, as usual, people make their own pathos.