That ridiculous idea lies at the core of political correctness: that a minority culture is always a victim of the majority culture—that even its crimes can be understood as having been provoked by the oppressions of the majority. During the cultural revolution of the 20th century’s later decades, Britain swallowed that toxic brew in lethal doses.

Thus, even after Islamists filled London’s public transportation with corpses, British officials read from the script, blaming not Islamism, but Islamophobia. London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, after initially condemning the attacks, within a couple weeks was saying that the true fault lay in “80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the Western need for oil.”

Yes—in Britain, one of the most widely used receptacles for pitching blame for Islamism is the war in Iraq. If only Tony Blair wasn’t George W. Bush’s poodle, 7/7 never would have happened, in other words.

The Church of England—deeply infected by liberalism and hatred of the West—put forward its recommendation for protecting Britain from another 7/7: Win the hearts of militant Muslims by prostrating before them. A group of Anglican bishops, in a September 2005 report, proposed that Britain apologize for the Iraq war. Since they didn’t expect Downing Street to do so, they agreed that the church itself should make a “public act of repentance” before Muslim leaders.

British criminologists came up with a unique explanation for what caused 7/7: that the terrorists were just trying to prove their masculinity. Presenting a paper on the subject to the British Society of Criminology, the University of Huddersfield’s Antony Whitehead explained, “It’s a very understandable dynamic. Young Muslim men in the British culture experience a lot of internalized pressure to conform to the idea of manhood—the ideal of courage and standing up for yourself. … We are coming at this from the wrong angle. We are making the assumption that it’s all about Islam.” In truth, virtually no one—at least, no one of influence—assumed it was “all about Islam”; in fact, they tied themselves in knots trying to prove their assumption that it was all about anything but Islam.