Manchester bomber Salman Abedi

There’s one question about the Manchester atrocity infinitely more pressing than any other. Why did a young man brought up in the city murder 22 of his fellow citizens in cold blood, many of them children, who had breathed the same air and walked the same streets?

It is curious how people skirt around this conundrum when offering an answer. Many partial explanations are given — many of them fine as far as they go, but incomplete, and therefore inadequate.

Donald Trump says terrorists such as Salman Abedi are ‘losers’ worthy of our contempt. So they are. Many of them are pathetic types, often with histories of petty crime. Yet there are lots of such people in the world, and most of them don’t contemplate mass murder.

Barbarity

Others reasonably point out many terrorists are drug takers, as Abedi is alleged to have been. They rightly say repeated drug abuse warps minds and can induce paranoia. All true, but it still does not take us to the heart of the matter.

Still others spread the net of blame wider, and cite the failures of recent British foreign policy, and in particular the destabilisation by Western forces of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya, which has led to the rise of Islamic fundamentalists who may have nurtured Salman Abedi.

And so it goes on. One explanation comes hard on the heels of another. Each sounds plausible. Each is part of the truth. But without one crucial factor they would not, even in combination, have led to the barbarity of the Manchester attack.

No, the point we must address squarely is Abedi was an Islamic fanatic. Not only that. All recent attacks — in Paris, Nice, Brussels, Stockholm and anywhere else you care to think of — were done in the name of Islam.

Perhaps the point that the perpetrators have all been Muslim is such an obvious one that commentators don’t feel it worth mentioning. But I rather think most prefer not to grapple with an uncomfortable truth which is hard to make sense of.