Norman Geras in The Guardian (of all places):
Within hours of the bombs going off two weeks ago, the voices that one could have predicted began to make themselves heard with their root-causes explanations for the murder and maiming of a random group of tube and bus passengers in London… it wasn’t very long – indeed no time at all, taking into account production schedules – before the stuff was spreading like an infestation across the pages of this newspaper, where it has remained.
It needs to be seen and said clearly: there are, among us, apologists for what the killers do. They make more difficult the fight to defeat them.
A longer version of the article, posted on Geras’ blog, includes this point:
Did you ever hear a Jenny Tonge who empathizes with the Palestinian suicide bomber also understanding the worries of Israeli and other Jews – after the Holocaust, after the decades-long hostility of the Arab world to the State of Israel and the teaching of hatred there against Jews, after the acts of war against that state and the acts of terrorism against its citizens? This would seem to constitute a potentially rich soil of roots and causes, but it goes unexplored by the supposedly non-excuse-making purveyors of a root-causism seeking to ‘understand’.
