The New York Times profiles Zarqa, Jordan, the hometown and location of the booze-friendly and tattooed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and notes the town has become “jihadist haven” with young men allegedly radicalizing one another with the only input given by local clerics instructions on how to enter Iraq. The eyes are on the prize, and the jihadists feel Iraq is the location to kill the cursed Infidel or Shia.

Interviews with Abu Ibrahim and relatives of the other men show that rather than having been individually recruited by an organization like Mr. Zarqawi’s, they gradually radicalized one another, the more strident leading the way. Local imams led them further toward Iraq, citing verses from the Koran to justify killing civilians. The men watched videos depicting tortured and slain Muslims that are copied from Internet sites.

But I thought Islam was against the killing of civilians? It is, with a caveat. A Shia is not an innocent civilian in hard-line Sunni Islamism, and the Shia are the preferred targets for the jihadists in Zarqa.  Also worth noting is that the codes within Islamism that either permit or restrict the killing of civilians only re-write the rules to which makes one civilian innocent versus another civilian wearing a target.  You can revise the Islamist code to suit what you want, in other words.

“It’s very difficult at the moment,” [Imam Ahmad Khalil Abdelaziz Salah] said. “If you do a suicide operation, the Muslims are mixed up with non-Muslims and maybe you kill Muslims.”

But he is hardly a voice of restraint. Mr. Salah counts Shiites among the non-Muslims. He joined the recent call for retribution against them, which gained fervor well beyond Zarqa after Shiite executioners were videotaped jeering as Saddam Hussein was hanged in December.

In his home he showed visitors a newly released video titled “The True History and Aims of the Shiites.” It portrays Shiites deriding the first three caliphs, or leaders of the ancient Islamic world, and saying that the youngest wife of the Prophet Muhammad, Aisha, had been a prostitute.

“You see, they hate our caliphs and they hate the Sunnis,” Mr. Salah said.

When the video showed scenes of Sunnis tortured and killed by a Shiite militia in Iraq, he added, “We didn’t see the Shiites like that before, but now in Iraq they showed their real face.”

In the face of this revelation the Shia in Iraq are bloodthirsty, according at least to Salah, he encourages Sunni jihadists to murder them, thus becoming bloodthirsty themselves. The logic is inescapable.

The jihadists profiled in the Times piece are educated and deeply religious, bucking the alleged trend that jihadists are not very religious, and the parenting they receive is remarkable.

Abu Ibrahim said he was frank with his parents. “I started to tell them that God wants us to give up our lives for jihad. They didn’t like it. They told me, ‘You’re still too young, wait.’ You know how mothers and fathers are. They didn’t want to hear such things.”

You’re still too young to murder people? Well, at least there seems to be a wait until a jihadist reaches a certain age, but the followers of Al Qaida in Iraq, the group in which the Zarqa jihadists are joining without question, certainly see nothing wrong with using children for their own means.