The toppling of the World Trade Center towers on September 11 broadcast live to the world that radical Islam must be taken seriously. This was a holocaust, forcing us to witness the planned deaths of 3,000 people and to imagine their anguish and suffering. Anyone could have been there. The rampage struck at the financial center of the world, at a city that symbolizes cultural diversity and inclusion, and perhaps not by chance, at the city that became home to so many European Jews fleeing from fascism. This has been a decade in coming. After abandoning his family's construction empire in Saudi Arabia and fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden had the foul imagination to conceive of a holding company for globalized terror. His ease with corporate forms has allowed him to provide financing, training, and materiel to Islamic insurgents around the world, and to escalate the destructive range of their work. In most political confrontations, there is an unspoken norm of proportionality, a customary law of violence, even an expected pattern of terrorist tactics. The techniques of terrorism are a way to get on television, to drain the good feeling out of life and demoralize resistance, to undermine the credibility of a regime that cannot offer protection. But at the hands of ordinary insurgents, the deaths of innocents usually are sought in numbers of five, ten, or one hundred. Al Qaeda's jihad against Judaism, Christianity, and the West has chosen to move the decimal point and increase the scale of destruction by several orders of magnitude with no apparent hesitation. Though one must speak with reticence and care about the past, bin Laden's imagination resembles that of Hitler, scaling up from pogrom to extermination.