Right-wing political parties and some of the religious groups appear to be trying hard to somehow confuse the issue by interlinking the TTP attack over teenage Malala Yousufzai with drones attacking North Wazirstan.

Yet again, Western governments and media are shocked. A group of fanatic Salafi and Ikhwan types attacked the US embassy in Cairo and the US consulate in Benghazi, and the US ambassador was killed.

Muslims and Muslim governments are angry with Bashar al-Assad. They hold him responsible for the massacre of thousands of people, many of them innocent civilians, in Syria. They want him to go.

It is true that Bashar’s army has killed a lot of people. It has used excessive force ---as I have pointed out in a number of articles before this. Anyone with a conscience would condemn the mindless violence that has bloodied Syria in the last 17 months.

In his book on World War II in the Pacific, War Without Mercy, John Dower tells an extraordinary tale about the changing American image of the Japanese fighting man.  In the period before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, it was well accepted in military and political circles that the Japanese were inferior fighters on the land, in the air, and at sea -- “little men,” in the phrase of the moment.  It was a commonplace of “expert” opinion, for instance, that the Japanese had supposedly congenital nearsightedness and certain inner-ear defects, while lacking individualism, making it hard to show initiative.  In battle, the result was poor pilots in Japanese-made (and so inferior) planes, who could not fly effectively at night or launch successful attacks.