Filmmaker Woody Allen in an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel:
so in 2001 some fanatics killed some Americans, and now some Americans are killing some Iraqis. And in my childhood, some Nazis killed Jews. And now, some Jewish people and some Palestinians are killing each other. Political questions, if you go back thousands of years, are ephemeral, not important. History is the same thing over and over again.
Sigh… James Lileks has the rejoinder.