Short Take: Ethnic-Religious Violence in Thailand

Sri Lanka's ethnoreligious conflict, between the Hindu Tamils and the Sinhalese Buddhists, led to the invention of the suicide bomber. In Thailand, Seth Mydans reports today, the fighting is between Buddhists and Muslims.

Americans familiar only with this country's elite forms of Buddhism are sometimes surprised that this religion, like the others, has been invoked in mass hatred and killing. But human-kind feeling is its own kind of experience, with its own rules. To the extent that religion is used to tell Us from Them, the principles of that faith are irrelevant.