While I disagree with the hand-wringing in this column, I can't help but be struck by this little nugget of moral clarity about the nature of jihadi terrorists.

What can be seen time and again on various sites is that Islam, a great religion, has as some of its most devoted followers people whose fantasy is the mass murder of innocents -- women, children, non-combatants. I can't think of any other ideology or religion whose believers -- even the most perverted -- consider themselves martyrs for committing suicide in order to kill random shoppers or commuters. Japan's notorious kamikaze pilots in the Second World War targeted battleships, which is not to defend their actions, but simply to note the huge moral difference between targeting a battleship and a subway car.

And yet that is precisely the difference. In war, military forces attack military forces. As such, the kamikaze attacks are justifiable, even if they repulse Westerners as antithetical to our values. But the jihadis are much more interested in causing terror through mass casualties -- and generally target cvilians, not soldiers, because they are an easier target to reach and kill.

Those who seek to draw a moral equivalence between soldiers seeking to kill soldiers (and, unfortunately, unintended civilian victims) and terrorists looking to kill civilians have lost their moral compass.