Terrorist attacks on Western civilians are justified because they live in democracies and are directly responsible for government policies that anger Arabs, Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant implies in the latest excerpt of his memoirs. In the passages that appeared Tuesday in the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, Ayman al-Zawahri says the West understands only "the language of self-interest coupled with oppressive power."

"If we want to make them understand our rights we have to speak to them in the language they understand," he said.

In his memoirs, al-Zawahri accuses the West of the "crime" of creating Israel. "In undertaking this crime, the Western countries were supported by their people. Those people enjoy the freedom of decision .... In the end, they vote in elections to choose the governments they want, then pay taxes to willingly finance their policies," he said.

Al-Zawahri certainly gives the lie to accusations that the USA is carrying out a war against Muslims. A determination to kill people because they vote in elections and pay taxes is not a religious conviction. It isn't even a political conviction. It is pure psychopathy. And if the conversation is being phrased "in the language we understand," certainly the West must reply in the same language; to do otherwise would be discourteous. That means we should kill every adherent of al-Zawahri's kind of twisted reasoning anywhere they can be found.

Al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden, and their backers declared war not only on the United States, but on the West. Because those declarations were phrased in the terminology normally associated with raving madmen, the United States and the West didn't take them seriously. That allowed our enemy to achieve some notable successes against us. But the successes only came because war is so much easier to fight when there is only one side engaged. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were a product of hubris -- and lunacy.