How strange - yesterday I noticed a little item on gazeta.ru about the recently published autobiography of Imam Samudra, the guy behind the 2002 Bali bombings. 202 people died, six of them Americans, 56 Australians - and yet he writes that he was "taking revenge for the discrimination against Muslims all over the world by the United States."

Today, there was an explosion in Indonesia – for some reason by the Australian embassy, again, and almost next door to the Russian one.

Yesterday, somehow, I stumbled upon another terrorist book title: “Memoirs of a Palestinian Terrorist,” by Abu Daoud and Gilles Du Jonchay (Publisher: Arcade Books, December 2002)

Daoud is the guy behind the tragedy of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. In a Salon.com July 6, 1999 article about his memoir (its title was different then: "Palestine: From Jerusalem to Munich"), Arcade’s associate publisher, Jeanette Seaver, said: "This is a book about peace, not about war. […] This is a book that should be read as you would read Napoleon's notebooks: It is militarily and strategically interesting."

It’s sickening to think about how these horrible events sooner (two years) or later (quarter of a century) turn so abstract, so detached from the pain they were once causing – the pain that is still there for so many people. First, both sides yell, No to terrorism! - and bomb the shit out of the innocent people, and then each side ends up writing memoirs... And some even manage to snatch a Nobel Peace Prize.

I wonder which one of the Chechens is gonna write a “militarily and strategically interesting" memoir about the Beslan siege: most of those who were inside the school seem to be dead and those who might have acted as their superiors – Basayev, Maskhadov, Zakayev – are either sitting quietly somewhere in the mountains or saying they had nothing to do with it at all. But they’ve still got enough time to make up their minds about this authorship thing.