Bomb attacker led a life punctuated by suicide bombing.

The news from Manchester is shocking. Historically, of course, there's some truth in the idea of a historical revenge motive behind some of the bomb attacks. But it's not true that most bomb attack victims are from European countries.  Children are killed that way every week in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and a number of other countries.  And in any case, if people insist too closely on the interpretation that these bomb attacks are happening because of what colonisers and other exploiters did in the past (even if there is truth in that), they run the danger of suggesting that history is the direct cause of everything and that the sick people making and detonating these bombs are not personally and individually responsible for what they are doing. Also, in Japan, people risk shutting their eyes to the fact that, for example, at a place like the Rainbow Hall in Nagoya, Nagoya Station gets hopelessly jammed with teenagers every time a train stops before a pop concert, so that it would be far easier than in Manchester to lay a bomb to kill fifty or so people. If anyone believes that bomb-layers are careful enough in their reading of Edward Said to know that the Rainbow Hall in Nagoya is not a good place to target, I'm a little worried that one day they will be wrong. Crazy killers may not all behave as logically as that.      

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