text: Nick Cohen in today's The Guardian newspaper:-
  
  "The worst elements on the left once exploited Islamism in an identical manner. When jihadis attacked New York, London or Paris they, too, joined what I called the “kill us, we deserve it” school of foreign policy analysis. In their case, it was not our tolerance of immigration that brought punishment. Rather, they explained away the crimes of an irrational religious totalitarianism as logical responses to western foreign policy, poverty or discrimination, which, and since you mentioned it, they already opposed.
  
  "Outside Stop the War, you hear less of that argument now. Perhaps it has finally sunk in that portraying Muslims as bombs primed to explode on western provocation was a picture that drew appreciative applause from a far right that held that Muslims could never live peacefully in the west."