In the article just featured in the previous post, Andrew Anthony quotes the following passage from John Pilger, which deserves to be noted separately:
The current threat of attacks in countries whose governments have close alliances with Washington is the latest stage in a long struggle against the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination. The motivation of those who plant bombs in railway carriages derives directly from this truth.No surprise, perhaps, that someone who has already decided not to be choosy about the kind of 'resistance' he's willing to support in Iraq should now also be willing to, er, 'understand' in this way the random murder and maiming of innocent train passengers in Spain. Note 'derives from'. Yet once more we see an intellectual of the left indulging in that facile moral slide which only omits to explain why the struggle against empire was not always and everywhere waged by such methods, methods that are both chosen and avoidable. Pilger's accents here, nonetheless, are of the authentic voice of a large current of post-9/11 left-liberal opinion, ready to see in the mass murder of innocents an expression, rather than betrayal, of the struggle for humanity and justice.
(The piece from which this quote comes is in the New Statesman, locked behind a subscription requirement I don't encourage anyone to take up.)