Not surprisingly the novelty of having to read a progressive left-wing opinion in the Guardian has provoked a response in the letters pages today:
Here is the reply from one of the Socialist Workers Party’s leading theoreticians:
If such bombings are the result of “fundamentalist beliefs that teach hatred”, such beliefs have characterised the behaviour of “civilised” western politicians, generals and businessmen in vast regions of the world for centuries. In the case of areas which were once centres of Muslim civilisation, the record stretches from the start of the British conquest of India in 1757 and the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, to the present occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. We are rightly horrified when people who have witnessed such horrors come to believe that inflicting such horrors themselves is the way to fight oppression. But we should not be surprised, nor should we regard them as uniquely evil.
Chris Harman
International Socialism Journal