Geoffrey Alderman addresses the causes of the July bombings. He rejects as mere rationalisation an Al-Qaida statement claiming the attacks were in response to Britain’s participation in the invasion of Iraq, and argues that the bombings were in fact inspired by Islam.

“It is at least to his credit that the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the Islamic assassin Mohammed Boyeri, said nothing at his trial a few weeks ago, but appeared in court in a flowing robe, holding a copy of the Koran.”

Alderman dismisses other explanations – social and economic deprivation, for example – and declares: “We are inevitably driven back to the Muslim faith that the bombers professed and practised.” Though Alderman accepts that Muslim organisations in Britain “have lost no time in distancing themselves from this particular branch of their faith”, he concludes: “The fact of the matter is, however, that the terrorist occupies a place of honour within Islam.”

And on what authority does he make this statement? “I urge anyone who doubts this to read the seminal work, ‘The Trouble With Islam’, by the Canadian Muslim Irshad Manji.”

Jewish Chronicle, 11 August 2005

You can imagine what the response of the JC would be if a Muslim journalist had written something similar about last week’s terrorist attack by Kach activist Eden Natan-Zada on Arabs travelling on a bus in Israel – claiming that it was significant that Natan-Zada revered the Torah, that “we are inevitably driven back to the Jewish faith that the killer professed and practised” in explaining the attack, and that “the terrorist occupies a place of honour within Judaism”.