An affiliate of al Qaeda released pictures today showing that they had beheaded American hostage Paul Johnson. What else can you say, except that these people are barbarians. Some of Johnson's suspected killers, thankfully, no longer ply their nefarious trade.

The terrorist group threatened the grisly execution unless Saudi Arabia released al Qaeda prisoners and all Americans departed the country. Knowing that these demands wouldn't and couldn't be met, the terrorists chopped off Johnson's head. The group released a statement that the beheading should be "a lesson for them to learn for whoever comes to our country, this will be their punishment."

More than half the world's immigrants are leaving predominantly Muslim nations, yet when a handful of non-Muslims work in a Muslim nation it creates a xenophobic frenzy. In addition to the xenophobia present in many Muslim states is a proclivity to engage in warfare. Samuel Huntington pointed out in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order that although followers of Islam constituted about a sixth of the world's population, they found themselves in the 1990s involved in more than half the world's wars. Based on observation, Muslims seem to be disproportionately involved in terrorism as well.

Whereas Christians seek to convert non-believers, many Muslims gain satisfaction by simply killing them. "The Koran and other statements of Muslim beliefs contain few prohibitions on violence," Huntington notes, "and a concept of nonviolence is absent from Muslim doctrine and practice."

So how do we prevent violence--like the murder of Paul Johnson--from occuring in the future? Discarding our naivety about our enemies--e.g., Islam is a religion of peace--seems a good first step. Their culture is not like ours, and approaching regional problems with Western solutions (democracy, free-market economies, religious tolerance) will not work as long as Islamic nations revel in their backwardness and savagery. Uprooting fourteen-hundred years of tradition doesn't happen overnight, nor is it a realistic endeavor for the West to undertake.

"The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism," Huntington asserts. "It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed by the inferiority of their power."