Says Norman Geras in this brilliant article.

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 was due to Blair, Iraq, illegal war and the rest of it. [...] No words of dismay, let alone grief, could be allowed to pass some people’s lips without the accompaniment of a “We told you so” and an exercise in blaming someone other than the perpetrators.

It seems there’s a worldwide fraternity of terrorist-apologists. Not only in terms of their predictable “root cause” explanations, as this author puts it, but in thought and language they use. I’m not insinuating anything, but when a news house of BBC’s stature (?) has an editorial policy that forbids the use of the word “terrorist,” (Link courtesy: JK) what do we speak of other, ordinary mortals? As JK correctly points out, this kind of language obfuscates understanding the real issue and so we are in a situation where we blame the victims: they had it coming.

Exactly as if you were to hear from a distraught friend that her husband had just been murdered while walking in a “bad” neighbourhood, and to respond by saying you were sorry about this but it was foolish of him to have been walking there by himself. We had the same after 9/11; still, one nurtures the illusion that people learn. Evidently some don’t.

Some don’t or don’t want to? With the upsurge in terror acts in recent times, we also notice an almost, equally sinister development. The growth of terror rationalizers. As Norman says,

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.

Like the old words of wisdom: it is easier to fight an enemy from the outside but often the battle is lost because of traitors within. Whatever their motivations are–some of these apologists are obviously innocent but their belief that their rationale is in the right is reinforced by other apologists who are politically motivated.

The plea will be - it always is - that these are not apologists, they are merely honest Joes and Joanies endeavouring to understand the world in which we live. What could be wrong with that? What indeed? Nothing is wrong with genuine efforts at understanding; on these we all depend. But the genuine article is one thing, and root-causes advocacy seeking to dissipate responsibility for atrocity, mass murder, crime against humanity, especially in the immediate aftermath of their occurrence, is something else.

Note the selectivity in the way root-causes arguments function. Purporting to be about causal explanation rather than excuse-making, they are invariably deployed on behalf of movements or actions for which their proponent wants to engage our indulgence, and in order to direct blame towards some party towards whom he or she is unsympathetic.

Classic example: this fabrication article that the Verbal Terrorist wrote four years ago. Exactly on the aftermath of Sep 11. Ironically, this too appeared in Guardian Unlimited, the same paper which carries Norman’s (current) article.

The conclusion of Norman’s article contains both a warning as well as the way out: to challenge the apologists at every turn.

Whatever the combination of impulses behind the pleas of the root-causes apologists, they do not help to strengthen the democratic culture and institutions whose benefits we and they share. Because we believe in and value these we have to contend with what such people say.[.]We have to contest what they say of this kind, challenge it all along the line. We are not obliged to respect their repeated exercises in apologia for the inexcusable.

Read the longer, the full piece which appears in his (excellent) blog.