Reflections on the Stockholm Suicide Bombing.

Following the botched suicide bomb attack in Stockholm on 11 December 2010, when two bombs exploded killing the bomber and injuring two people, there have been the usual efforts at "damage limitation" by those offering spurious explanations as to the reason for such attacks.

This is the first suicide bomber in Scandinavia and I am surprised that so many are – surprised. It reminds me of when the passenger jets crashed into the towers in New York. I never understood the surprise that followed. Wasn't this exactly what we had expected?

A situation where the extreme, the desperate and the furious attacked the western world that for so long had humiliated Muslim countries. An attack that would be understandable but nevertheless wrong and worthy of condemnation.

For a start the Al Qaida terrorists that attacked the Twin Towers on 9/11 were those like Mohammed Atta who was a privileged architecture student who was from a relatively well to do family in Egypt who has spent much time in Europe after studying at Hamburg University. He was not the 'wretched of the earth'.

The absurdity of Henning Mankell's position, in The Guardian todayis in his contorted attempts to "understand" why the Stockholm Bomber, Taimour Abdulwahab, could have wanted to murder so many people when it would be far better to concentrate on the 'how' and call for better police methods to stop such lunatics.

The Swedish artist Lars Vilks, for example, has ridiculed Islam and the Prophet in some of his work. It was well known that some people wanted to kill him, but no one really believed that the threat would mean something even more serious.

However, many people in Sweden seem unable to grasp that by having troops in Afghanistan we are now the enemies of the extremists. Our troops should never have been sent there. I am not saying that I am afraid of extremists. But I do not want Swedish soldiers to fight a war that is not ours, but that of the United States'.

The bomber's motives remain that of a man with a "transferable grievance" . In a deracinated and atomised society in the West, the Iraqi-born Islamist could have found any number of pretexts to blow himself up. Mankell is simply trying to rationalise terrorism here to assuage the sense of fear.

This is what Christopher Caldwell referred to in his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe as 'fear masquerading as tolerance'. For Swedish liberals it is simply incomprehensible that ideological fanatics might well want to murder Swedish citizens as Sweden has been so nice the developing world.

As a result he believes that Swedish troops should not be in Afghanistan as it is not "their war" and effectively makes Sweden a target no less than the USA was on 9/11. But obviously the bomber explicitly mentioned Lars Vilks as a reason to kill those who "insult Islam" before throwing in Afghanistan for good measure.

Mentioning Afghanistan was necessary as part of "the propaganda of the deed", to give mass murder in Stockholm more credence amongst other Muslims in Sweden, stimulate a disproportionate response, ramp up hatred and entrench fault lines between Swedish Muslims and the rest of the population.
If Abdulwahab's deed could have achieved that, it is partly due to the immigration policies of the Swedish government in encouraging it throughout the 1990s on such a huge scale without thought for how such numbers could be assimilated to do the jobs a cosseted populace no longer wanted to do at the going rate of payment.

In Sweden the policy of mass migration was followed by the ghettoisation of poorer Muslims on estates in ugly concrete blocks in Stockholm, Malmo and Gothenburg throughout that decade, at a time when the Swedish economy was losing jobs in manufacturing and shipbuilding, was hardly a wise policy.

In 2008 there were riots in the Rosengard district of Malmo, which led sociologist Aje Carlbom to warn that such "enclavisation" provided fertile ground for Islamists and that "Swedish society doesn't understand what's going on because of the climate of tolerance". Tolerance meaning fear, indifference or distance from reality.

As regards Afghanistan, it is true that this struggle necessarily involves NATO states contributing to a war that kills Muslims which can potentially radicalise those for whom migration is a form of compensation for the Muslim world whose harmony has been destroyed by greedy energy intensive Western states.

The contours of the new psychopathological conflicts that seem set to lead to intractable problems in the 21st century are emerging. Afghanistan is part of a struggle to get the TAPI pipeline built, part of a geopolitical strategy to integrate the economies of the region and ensure diversity of gas supplies.

In that sense, Sweden has as much interest in supporting the War in Afghanistan as any other state in the West increasingly dependent upon diminishing supplies to shore up economies reliant on fossil fuels to keep the consumer hyper-economy going. Islamists have been prepared to make the connections that secular progressives have not.

No matter what good intentions Sweden had in joining the effort by the West to ensure development in Afghanistan, it is sure to be resented by those who rationalise their loss of identity and hatred for the consumerist decadence of the West that is all around with pornography and 'sexual freedom' into violence.

Yet Swedish presence in Afghanistan is merely but one pretext in a wider collection of grievances, so calling for withdrawal from Afghanistan simply to appease Islamist violence is imprudent. Withdrawal could be justified simply because the war is futile, cannot be won and adds to anti-Western feeling. But it does not cause it.

The mixture of greed and guilt that drives much of what states such as Sweden and other European liberal states is assisting in the potential for conflict. Permitting thousands of immigrants from Iraq and "the Muslim World" to settle is not necessarily any guarantee that Sweden will be loved for such gestures after its ally smashed Iraq in the first place.

With 'liberal' immigration policies connected with granting asylum to refugees from Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Eastern Turkey ( Kurdistan ) and Bosnia and Kosovo, Sweden had a Muslim population between 20,000 and 400,000 by 2000 before the additional influx due to the US invasion of Iraq.

In itself that is no reason to assume "clash of civilisations" is inevitable. Yet the way that Muslims in Sweden are classified as "ethnic Muslims", in such a way as to conflate race with religion and contribute towards the construction on of Islam as a hyper-identity that goes beyond mere religious affiliation and practice.

At the same time unless the West weans itself off oil and gas from dangerous lands in the Middle East and finds alternatives it is going to be dragged into intractable conflicts that will get worse as competition for ever scarcer fossil fuels leads to more meddling in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Muslim organisations need to put together a plan of action for how to work in schools and in study circles to be able to deal with the growing Islamophobia that we face in Sweden and many other western countries. And for this they should have the full support of the Swedish government.

Reflexive waffle about "Islamophobia" without even understanding the reason why the West is hated so viscerally in the first place has led only to more assertions of Western guilt, whilst the continuing call for harmonious multicultural togetherness in a rootless consumer society fuelled by oil from Muslim lands looks increasingly a recipe for division and strife.

Those like Mankell ought to avoid rationalisations for terrorism, not least with regards what seems at this moment to be a "lone wolf attack", that provide windy "explanations" for why Sweden might have been a target because of it being in Afghanistan. The driving forces of Islamist terrorism are more complicated and more disturbing.

For nothing is more reassuring than the believe that only if "we" in the West did more to prevent war and conflict or did the right thing, then it would cease to be a target. Avoiding being bogged down in conflicts in Muslim lands is only one part of staving off domestic discontent but Islamism in the West has its own history and development.