Via Engage, an excellent piece by Howard Jacobson on a particularly insidious example of the “diminished responsibility” theory of terrorism.

Jacobson writes:

We are not unsubtle in this column. We understand that a simmering resentment will not always express itself rationally or fairly. In frustration, the angry often kill the wrong people in the wrong places. But to argue that Palestine fuelled the massacre at Mumbai, that the Hindu waiter shot in the forehead after serving water to a terrorist was paying for the inequities of Gaza, that he wasn’t already, in the eyes of that terrorist, expendable enough as an unbeliever, as one who had stolen Kashmir, or simply as a spot of target practice en route to a mad and misguided martyrdom, is not only preposterous, it is irresponsible.

Read it all. And pay a visit to Petra Marquardt-Bigman on the same theme.