Viewers of Napkelte heard a strange conversation on Sunday morning. Three influential figures in Hungarian public life - László Lengyel, Miklós Gáspár Tamás (Gazsi) and Elemér Hankiss - had a conversation. The interviewer asked them about terrorism - why couldn't America pull itself together? If it couldn't, why couldn't it just stop it? One could only guess at what America was meant to stop doing.

László Lengyel took the bate: from one day to the next, the US - which creates such wonders - had become helpless. It was helpless when the aeroplane flew into the tower, helpless when a hurricane headed towards a city. The American administration had always insisted that it could solve any problem, "and now we see that they have no solutions, they can't solve the problem."

Gazsi didn't need any bate. On September 13, 2001 he had written an article predicting dark times ahead. The Guardian had written that the organisation that carried out the London bombings had been working for the British secret services, and that the same organisation had sent several thousand Muslim fighters to the Balkans to fight the Serbs. (I checked: the sources are an obscure Indian research institute and a retired American prosecutor, John Loftus, who has written various books based on conspiracy theories). The terrorists had lived and studied in the West, the children of the upper middle class. It was a global crisis, people felt ill at ease. Some acted destructively, but the West was no less destructive. Hopelessness, irrationality, chaos - these, Gazsi said, were the sources of our malcontent.

Elemér Hankiss largely agreed. As he said, states reacted badly to terrorism, making the problem worse. But terrorism was an extreme, distorted mirror phenomenon of civil society. There are those who have no way to protect their rights, win justice, and earn their bread other than to rise up against the global machine. Terrorism could not be stopped by military means, he said. Politics could make terror even worse. The state could react by being harder, by being less just - or by following the Spanish - and to some extent the British - examples, by creating a fairer country. We should try to help the poor and the suppressed get a full hearing. We should look after their interests.

I couldn't believe it. The three intellectuals were calling for dialogue with terrorists. Noble enough, but these people have no interest in talking - they want to destroy the West. Had my friends forgotten that the extremist Islamic terrorists wanted to sweep away the "empire" of the Christians and the Jews and replace it with an empire of the true faith? And why didn't T. Lakat notice the contradiction between Gazsi and Elemér's arguments? If the terrorists were western-educated middle class kids, then what was the role of the poor, those living in an unfair world? What of sharia law and discrimination against women under Islamic law?

And what of America's role? It's a shame my friends joined the crowd pelting America in the stocks. You can argue about Iraq, but almost everyone agreed that it was correct to drive al-Kaida out of Afghanistan. America is no more responsible for September 11 than President Bush is for Hurricane Katrina.
I am not here to defend America. But I find it frightening that three learned intellectuals should choose the anniversary of September 11 to condemn America and seek rational explanations for this "twisted distortion of civil society" known as mindless killing.

Richárd Hirschler