The release of kidnapped BBC correspondent Alan Johnston may prove to be more than a blessed ending to a cruel and colossally stupid act that set a new standard for Palestinians undermining Palestinian interests.

We may be seeing a turning point of sorts, perhaps a part of the beginning of the end of the era of world terrorism.

During the early years of this decade, residents of terror-targeted countries began to view radical Islamic terrorism much as AIDS had been viewed a generation before: incurable, unfathomable, universal, unstoppable.

The mortal enemy of modernity, radical Islam had the viral capacity to marshal the very tools of globalization - satellite television, the cell phone, the World Wide Web, hand-held digital video, unfettered air travel - to punish and terrorize and paralyze the infidel.

The West had heard the message before, from onetime Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, but the bottom line was essentially the same: "Whether you like it or not. history is on our side. We will bury you!"

For the jihadist, the range of legitimate targets was to expand with abandon, from U.S. and Israeli soldiers, to U.S. and Israeli civilians, including women and children, to European, Asian and African non-combatants, to journalists, to Muslim soldiers, to Muslim clerics, to Muslim women and children, to mosques.

There was no standing in their way, it seemed. The obsession with martyrdom turned warfare on its head: Kill them, and they win. By definition, the creed of suicide bombing, the drive to die, rendered useless all forms of deterrence.

Through it all, it must be said, a newly electronically enabled world media effectively spurred the bloodshed, offering monsters a magnifying mirror, and instant access to billions across the world.

As anti-Muslim intolerance mounted in much of the West, there was a tendency in the press, as in academia, to coddle Islamists, to sidestep thorny questions, to refrain from pursuing the kind of relentless probing that, locally for example, had for decades yielded reams of newsprint on "How Israel Has Lost Its Soul," or "How Jews Suffered at the Hands of Nazis, and Now Palestinians are Suffering at the Hands of Israelis."

Many journalists, steering clear of value judgments or words like terrorism, saw themselves as implementing a kind of affirmative action of the mind, telling the untold story of disadvantaged and despairing Muslims, the subtext being: this is the root problem, the World Trade Center and the 18 Jerusalem City Bus were but the symptoms.

Nonetheless, revolutions, like viral epidemics, tend to run their course in time. Recently, like Khrushchev's godless Communism, terror-based jihadism has shown signs of losing its juggernaut aura. Perhaps it's the desperation creeping into the messages of Bin Laden second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri, quite clearly on the defensive, scorned by rival Islamic clerics and groups who have attacked Al-Qaida policies in Iraq and elsewhere, criticizing Al-Qaida tactics and strategy as contrary to Islam.

There is little question that as terror hit enlightened nation after enlightened nation, the journalists and editors of each country immediately adopted the idea that there is such a thing as terrorism after all. Victim-blaming gave way overnight to sympathy for the victim.

In the Palestinian context, the irony of the resort to terrorism, is that acts designed to catapult the Palestinian issue to the top of the world's agenda, have over time had the opposite effect. Suicide bombings and post-withdrawal Qassam rockets have soured the world to the plight of the Palestinians, while chaos and brutal fighting between rival parties has drained sympathy for the idea of Palestinian statehood.

The world has tired of its Palestinians, and, at this point, even the Palestinians know why.

The gunmen, with their ostentatiously hideous masks, their idolatrous worship of rifles, their supermodel-worthy posturing and their ludicrous language of heroism, have of late taken on the pathetic air of grown men who cannot bear to stop acting like little boys.

If we have learned anything in this decade of invasion, occupation and dismay, it is that Muslim terrorism will only end when Muslims decide that it should. Perhaps the obscenities of Muslims fighting Muslims in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Pakistan are beginning to cause the fire of Islamist terror to consume itself.

It may be too much to hope that the gunmen in their fright masks will soon grow up and see what they have done to the Palestine they love. God help them if they do not. God help them if they do.

This is the first of two parts. Next week: Does the Mideast matter?