After a fortnight's holiday, I find I'm utterly baffled by the War on Terror

In the same piece Finkelstein also makes some interesting points about Robin Cook, the myth of the consensus against terror, & others.

After a fortnight's holiday, I find I'm utterly baffled by the War on Terror
Daniel Finkelstein
Times
August 10, 2005

The Grieve Paradox:

Apparently, last week, the Shadow Attorney-General, Dominic Grieve, said that he thought the London suicide bombings were “totally explicable in terms of the level of anger” of the Muslim community. This was widely portrayed as coming close to justifying the attack. Yet surely, whatever may have been Mr Grieve’s intent, his remarks do nothing of the sort. Or have I misunderstood something?

Mr Grieve’s remarks came at a time when the Home Office Minister Hazel Blears was touring the country listening to the views of the Muslim community. Yet if the Tory MP was correct,this would be a disastrous thing to do.

As the US lawyer Alan Dershowitz points out in his book Why Terrorism Works: “The real root cause of terrorism is that it is successful — terrorists have consistently benefited from their terrorist acts.” The advance of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the 1970s suggests he is right. Thus if the cause of the London bombings was indeed the anger of Muslim youth the last thing one should do is reward it with political concessions.

If, on the other hand, Mr Grieve is wrong and the cause of the terrorism is an unappeasable religious doctrine rather than specific political demands, then efforts to address the political issues that anger Muslim youth would not provide an incentive for terrorists. They can go ahead, based solely on whether they are the right thing to do. There is, therefore, a Grieve Paradox — the more correct he is, the less one should do about it.