Much of the left in this country (& elsewhere) have been in full Diana-mode long before the attack two days ago - basically being reactionary in the most literal sense: re-acting to the initiatives taken by their real or perceived enemies (summed under the rubric of capitalism) with cursing, spell-casting, name-calling, blame-casting, guilt trips and developing morality play fantasies in lieu of empirical analyses.
Declarations of various Communist Parties, some of them posted to this list, also fall into the same mode of moral condemnation cum world-system poetic justice divinations. Nobody in his right mind supports attacks on civilian targets and nobody in his right mind doubts that those who launch such attacks do it for reasons (no matter how perverted) that have something to do with the characteristics or behavior of the target population. But treating those reasons or rationalizations as causes of such attacks is based on the same logic as blaming domestic violence or rape on teh behaviour of the victim ("she made me do it, your honor"). Since virtually no-obe on the left would endorse the lattere, much much of the left succumbns to the former - this is a clear sign of the intellectual bankruptcy of the left: not only what they say is empirically vacuous, but they cannot even say that without falling into double standards or logical inconsistencies.
Without the ideolgical blinders of the cosmic morality play favoured by both pro- and anti-establishment ideologues, the current events appear as a small part of a long historical process - a dialectic relationship between technologically superior and technologically backward peoples. While the peoples with technological advantage (be it agriculture some 10 thousand years ago, industrialization two hundred yeard years ago, or information technology today) initially prevail, the technologically backward peoples often quickly learn how to use the victor's technology to their own advantage. Since the adoption of new technologies triggers profound social institutional changes in the society that adopts them, thatis usually followed by symbolic-ideological justifications that cognitively "adopt" the novel technology (which btw is the central theme of Marx's essay _18th brummaire of Louis Bonaparte - the "history repeats itself twice"). The Japanese did that in their Meji restoration, and the Russian and Chinese did the same thing during their respective revolutions which were, in fact, rapid industrialization projects justified by state ideologies deeply rooted in old peasant communitarianism sprinkled by a few buzzwords from the Marxist weltanschauung.
Paradoxically, Nazism fits the same scheme - a great industrial/military leap forward cloaked in ancient germanic ideology. In the same vein, the upsurge of islamism is, to paraphrase Marx, the tragedy of islamic history repeating itself as a farce (if that word is appropriate in the context of extreme destruction it has caused). The basically backward islamic societies are being uprooted by modernization, carried mostly by their own agents of modernization (such as Ataturk, Nasser or Hussein) - and the old institutional order disintegrating (just as MArx in his _British rule in India_ predicted). Islamism is both an ideological costume justifying the project and a reaction of backward elements in society to this modernization trend.
So what we see is the cold war history repeating itself as it were twice, first time as a tragedy, second time as a diabolical farce - complete with grotesque dictators, kings, sheiks, prophets, followers driving themselves to a religious frenzy, and kindred characters from the islamic menagerie. Only in the topsy-turvy world of ideological wishful thinking of marginalised malcontents in this and other Western countries can this menagerie be considered a force of progress or revolution.
A personal note: Two days ago that menagerie destroyed something that I aesthetically admired, not to mention the tremendous loss of life. That makes me very upset, I can only hope that reason will eventually prevail over emotions in addressing these developments.
wojtek