...I can understand Mrs Hurndall’s wish to map what she believes to have been her son’s personal qualities to his political convictions. There is, however, absolutely no reason that the rest of us should take her judgements seriously.

Tom Hurndall’s political affiliations were despicable. So far from being a ‘peace activist’, his favoured cause was hostility to Israel. He was in Gaza on behalf of an organisation called the International Solidarity Movement, which declares on its web site, “we recognize the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle.”

Since I first wrote about this simultaneously mindless and monstrous remark, the ISM has posted a disingenuous explanation of it. It runs:

The ISM does not support or condone any acts of terrorism, because terrorism is not legitimate armed struggle.

But of course this is, in the technical sense, begging the question. The ISM assumes the truth of its conclusion – that it does not condone terror – in its premises, for it does not regard what Palestinian bombers do as terrorism. I have read the ISM’s polemics with some care, and I have yet to find an instance where a suicide bomber is described as a terrorist other than in an ironic sense intended to denigrate the unenlightened judgement of those of us who abominate his cause. ISM correspondents’ own preferred label is, extraordinarily and revealingly, ‘martyr’.

It’s a repulsive moral evasion. What distinguishes the suicide bomber is not that he commits suicide (an act that is itself at odds with the historical notion of ‘martyrdom’) but that he explodes bombs - invariably among large numbers of civilians, with the intention of killing as many of them as possible...