On Tuesday evening I was pleasantly surprised (as were a couple of commenters) by RESPECT candidate Salma Yaqoob’s responses in a BBC Radio 4 interview about the London bombers. Given enough rope by “Mad Dog” Milne of The Guardian‘s opinion pages, however, she happily climbed the scaffold:

“This cycle of violence has to be broken. By confining analysis to simple religious terms, however, politicians are asking the impossible of our security services as well as Muslim leaders. No number of sniffer dogs or sermons denouncing the use of violence against innocents can detect and remove the pain and anger that drives extremists to their terrible acts. The truth is that shoddy theology does not exist without a dodgy foreign policy.”

Perhaps she means the dodgy foreign policy of arming fundamentalist guerillas in a proxy war against the Soviet Union.