Disgruntled from Yorkshire

In apparently stark contrast to Paul Berman's view that the threat posed by radical Islamic terror is a reconfiguration of "the war between liberalism and the apocalyptic and phantasmagorical movements that have risen up against liberal civilisation ever since the calamities of the First World War," Spiked's Brendan O'Neill sees it as "less evidence of any kind of ‘clash of civilisations’ and more the consequence of the decline and fall of Western civilisation and its move into a new era of identity, narcissism and malaise."

Between 9-11 and 7-7 many European commentators exhibited a new-found solidarity with the Palestinian cause. If people were prepared to blow themselves up, they must be being almost incomprehensibly oppressed. Suicide terror became a measure of Zionist guilt. Then a bunch of fairly mainstream British Muslims from Yorkshire self-detonated on London's transport network and a revised explanation was required.

O'Neill for instance, sets about denying non-domestic causality. "The 7-7 atrocity was a very British bombing," as the bombers were just an extreme instance of our society's disgruntlement with itself, particualrly with Bluewater chavs, urban nightclub "slags" and such like. "They were a product of identity politics and victim cuture more than radical foreign Islamism...from their narcissistic elevation of identity to their use of body for transcendence, their terrorist attack was made at home."

So, O'Neill concludes, see not the hand of Liberalism's oldest foe, but instead its growing tendency to self-mutilate. "A scream of rage from within," comparable say to the fashion for body piercing. This is dangerous nonsense.

I don't think the London bombers' apparent lack of contact with ranting Imams should be taken to indicate that they simply used their religion to "contextualise" an already present desire to harm themselves and other random members of a degenerate society. No, in a shift remarkably similar to that which occured when bubonic plague became pneumonic plague, the pathology of Islamism is now "in the air" and it no longer requires direct contact with a radical 'rat' for the epidemic to spread from susceptible individual to susceptible individual.