He returned unharmed, and his brief comments are worth quite a bit more than most of the punditry blather:
What do I think of the events? I will leave geo-political analysis to those who know more about the Middle East and Islam. My overwhelming feeling is one of world-weary sadness. Human beings are the only mammals who regularly kill large numbers of their own species, not for food or sex or territory, but simply out of anger or despair or boredom or religious ecstasy. The communicants of the great Abrahamic religions have been slaughtering people for centuries -- indeed, for millennia -- and when their enthusiasm for blood wanes, secular mass murderers step forward to fill the void. Perhaps it is because I will soon be eighty-two, but I am weighed down by the fragility and brevity of our insignificant moment of life. So many of our greatest works of art are either explorations of this blood lust or celebrations of it. "Make love, not war," we said in the Sixties.Fat chance.
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