THE CNN footages of Palestinian men firing rifles into the air, women making funny faces, children jumping up in unadulterated jubilation over the World Trade Center tragedy give me the goose bumps. They are a sight to behold, pathetic and revolting at the same time.

How can human beings rejoice at the tragedy of their fellow human beings?
How can Muslims whose Holy Book proclaims the sanctity of life by equating murder of one human being to massacre of the whole of mankind take pleasure in the senseless death of innocent thousands?

It was a patently inhuman reaction by human beings, a grossly un-Muslim response from Muslims.

The gestures of those men and women were unquestionably unnatural and certainly irreligious. For humankind--created in God’s image--is essentially good. And Muslims or, literally, those who submit to the will of the merciful and beneficent Allah are supposed to be incapable of feelings less than benign and compassionate toward other creatures.

We can only surmise that the spontaneity of the Palestinian gyrations and trigger-squeezing can only be the logical result of deep-seated prejudice against all things "American" or "Western" and, therefore, "anti-Muslim."

But not only some Palestinians, or only some Muslims are guilty of this kind of intense malevolent feeling. In diverse degrees, at one time or another, all of us have felt it in our hearts.

That prejudice and hatred against outsiders reveal themselves in all groups is indisputable. They come in various degrees and forms. They develop along ethnic, religious, linguistic, racial, organizational and other lines.

Clearly, they are learned. By precept or example, they are bequeathed by parents, tribal leaders, church ministers, trainers or politicians.

The worst harbingers of these chauvinistic attitudes are demagogues who expect social, religious, political or fiduciary benefits from continued isolation of their group. They can be your soft-spoken rabbi, grim-looking commandante, or seemingly amiable ustadz. They can make Muslims seethe with anger against Christians or vice-versa, Jews against goyim, black against white, male against female.

When fully developed, prejudice turns into a permanent attitude of aggression that can be ubiquitous, urgent and basically unavoidable. The street-dancing Palestinians can be the best picture of such bigotry. The suicidal pilot on those planes that crashed into the WTC towers and the Pentagon can be the worst.

In his comprehensive study "The Nature of Prejudice," Gordon Allport divides prejudice into five degrees of intensity. These are antilocution, avoidance, discrimination, physical attack and extermination.

Antilocution can be expressed in plain badmouthing or subtler prose like Rudyard Kipling who referred to Africans and Asiatics as "new-caught sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child." This, along with avoidance and discrimination, can be enough to lead into the violence of the last two stages. That vicious line can be constantly developed, nurtured and reinforced into its tragic nadir by the demagogue who promises liberation or paradise.

Physical attack and extermination, such as in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, or Pol Pot’s Kampuchea are the final stages of the same aggressive attitude.

Thus, the raw mayhem of crashing planes and collapsing buildings, exploding bombs and torn flesh, crushing bones--all these start from the potent violence that lurk in every human heart. It resides there in the form of feelings less heinous in their latency but no less perilous in their fruition, such as the undiluted intention and unimpeded capacity to perpetrate a bloodbath and sow terror across the globe.

Until and unless our hearts are cleansed from this acquired human malady, we can expect the worst, especially in our high-tech era.

Stop for a moment and think about this: Will you not laugh in celebration if a tragedy happens to your favorite object of hatred? Will you not enjoy even more if the perpetrator is the object of your undying love?

It may be painful to admit that no one is absolutely innocent of the carnage in New York, or of those that will follow, except the ones who carry no seed of ethnic, religious, or ideological rancor in their breasts. But that’s the grim reality. Strife in the land starts from the violence in our hearts.

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