Daniel Finkelstein in today's Times:
Few Westerners may subscribe to the "Jews did it" theory (though a vast number of Arabs do) but other, hardly more credible, "reasons" have attracted much greater support. It was Bush's fault, it was Blair's fault, it was the fault of American policy in the Middle East, it was the fault of all of us who have done nothing about the desperation of alienated Muslims. So many seem incapable of accepting that these things happen just because criminals do criminal things. It is no more interesting to understand their reasoning than to find out what the Yorkshire Ripper thinks about prostitutes.No, but also yes. No, it's not just because 'criminals do criminal things'. Yes, however, in that the reasons reached for are nearly always speculative, disputable and blame-shifting, an attempt to divert attention from the immediate agency of a gross human crime.