But Nathan, Hitler was a person (not some alien creature), and he's not the only one to have pursued genocidal policies. What about the Roman emperer Nero and the persecution of the Christians, or the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, or the Rwandan situation a few years ago? And for every actual evil-doer there are lots more who would gladly enter that infamous pantheon if they only had the power to do so (which thankfully they don't).
Besides, this reaction just seems odd given other atrocities which take place on a daily basis in various corners of the world. Is Sharon a demonic monster who can not be explained? What about Suharto or Pinochet? Or, for that matter, what about Bob Kerry? What about the people who made up the death squads in El Salvador in the '80's and around the world? What about Harry Truman for dropping the A-bomb? What about the KLA terrorists who blew up Serbian police stations? I'm going on memory here, but I haven't seen you denounce attempts to explain these events and others like them.
We're talking about a lot of people here, and the sort of thing we've seen in the WTC bombing - a heinous, terrorist act - has been seen countless times before. History is full of groups who often resort to terror to gain attention, fight an oppressor, or to simply get what they want. The IRA, the Basque movement, the Anarchists at times, and on and on. Strict adherence to your positon means writing off a persistent minority of the human family as inexplicably evil.
It's just too consistent a pattern and there are too many examples for me to believe that. It is easy to explain. Perhaps it is impossible to explain why it was Hitler specifically who went to such lengths to exterminate Jews, or why Mohammed Atta (I think that was his name) was the particular individual destined to fly flight 11 into the WTC. Why any individual reacts to a given situation in a particular way probably will remain a mystery in many cases. But when a group is oppressed, a small minority of its members consistently and predictably turns to violent resistance, often involving terrorist activity. And that terrorist minority does not act at random, but acts in opposition to the perceived (real or imagined) oppression.
Brett