We regretfully realize that many tragedies and other horrors of life simply cannot be avoided even if there is no ill will behind them. But civilized people still cannot really understand the purposeful evil so often perpetrated on a mass scale in some parts of the world.
Recently, in one of too many such incidents, a suicide bomber invaded a mass of human beings praying in a Sunni mosque in Baghdad -- and blew himself up! He threw away his own life to destroy the lives of many others -- in this instance killing dozens of innocent people and injuring dozens more.
In Mexico, meanwhile, members of a drug cartel are suspected of setting fire to a casino in the city of Monterrey, killing 52 people inside even though they were not believed to be connected to the drug trade.
And in Nigeria, radical Muslims claimed responsibility for a bombing at a U.N. building that killed nearly two dozen people and wounded dozens more.
We are disgusted as much by the cowardice of such attacks against civilian targets as by their vicious insanity.
Yet they are -- and are unfortunately likely to remain -- a painful reality of the broken world in which we live.