Since 9/11, I've watched scores of grainy video films showing Islamist extremists doing what they do best--meting out barbaric punishment to adulterers, thieves and Jewish journalists, and murdering innocent people in Mumbai, Lahore and other places. Yet nothing I'd seen so far had prepared me for the stomach-churning experience I had on Saturday when I watched a two-minute clip of a bearded member of the Taliban--in Swat, Pakistan--flogging a 17-year-old girl who'd been accused of adultery.

Here is the clip. Watch it before reading further. I suspect some of you--perhaps those with teenage daughters of your own--will be unable to watch it to the end.

These are a primitive people. These are a cruel people. To the more evolved observers of the human condition, nothing is...