Christopher Hitchens knocks the craven Fiachra Gibbons on her ass concerning her article on the causes of the bombing of two synagogues in Turkey.

[T]he presses of the London Guardian were churning out the following paragraph, from someone named Fiachra Gibbons:

So when six die, as they did on Saturday morning when their blood mingled with that of their Muslim neighbors blown to bits by a suicide bomber outside the Neve Shalom synagogue, the heart should miss a beat and the world weep. For we are mourning the loss of souls who had learned to span a supposedly unbridgeable gulf that is being daily widened by George Bush and our own dear, deluded leader.

In a way, this effort doesn't quite meet the standard of moral cretinism that I had suggested. It actually fails to make any link at all between the actions of the murderers and the policy of Bush and Blair. Rather, it simply assumes that the victims are to have their deaths attributed in this fashion. The prevalence of this assumption, along with its facile appearance in the pages of a great liberal newspaper, is something worth noting. [bold emphasis mine]

As the author undoubtedly knows—she elsewhere demonstrates some knowledge of Turkish Jewry—and as I reminded readers yesterday, the Neve Shalom synagogue has been lethally attacked before. The last occasion was in the late 1980s. At that time, the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher governments had for some years taken a pro-Saddam Hussein "tilt" in the Iran-Iraq war. I can't remember what the excuse of the Jew-killers was on that previous occasion, but it most certainly wasn't their hatred for regime change. Maybe they didn't come up with an excuse, imagining that the action spoke for itself. Anyway, why bother with a justification when there are so many peace-loving and progressive types willing to volunteer to make the excuses for you?