Britain's first suicide bombers have played into the hands of the BNP

With 221 candidates standing as the names of the two were released, the BNP is keen to link immigration with terrorism

No one can doubt that timing was important to Hamas, and to the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a breakaway group affiliated to Fatah, the ruling party in Palestinian politics. This latest suicide bombing, in a Tel Aviv bar in the early hours of Wednesday morning, was undoubtedly planned as a nihilistic comment on the road-map to peace, handed over hours later to the Israeli and Palestinian premiers.

It's more than possible, though, that the use of two Britons as the suicide bombers in this latest outrage was designed to deliver a strong message in itself. The road-map has been presented as the price Tony Blair extracted for his support for the US-led invasion of Iraq. How sinister that British men were recruited to express such contempt for this modest fresh start.

The timing on the domestic front was no less bitter. The local elections in the English regions may seem quite unrelated to the Middle East peace process. But the British National Party, with 221 candidates, is keen to link immigration with terrorism. Asif Mohammed Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, their faces staring out from British passports emblazoned over British newspapers, have managed to do that for them.

These two men were not "asylum-seekers", who are the people most commonly smeared as being likely to infiltrate Britain for the purposes of terrorism. But that really makes no difference. Although the rhetoric of race hate has been disguised of late as a concern only with incoming refugees, the BNP's many candidates still talk crazily of "whites being swamped" and of "mongrel races".

Dark complexions, Muslim names and the label "suicide bomber" are enough to convince many people that there is basis to the illogical prejudices of the BNP. The story may not have turned worries into votes right away. But the actions of these two pathetic, lunatic, extremists will make life more difficult for many people in Britain. That, in turn, will crank up the resentment that might be helping to make young people in Britain vulnerable to dangerous indoctrination.

The reaction of Hanif's family and acquaintances in Hounslow, west London, to the news that the 21-year-old had become Britain's first suicide bomber, was of shock and incredulity. His brother described him as a "big teddy bear", and said that as far as he'd known, he was still at Damascus University in Syria, studying Arabic.

At the mosque where he worshipped, one person, who would not be named, spoke of a "gentle" activist, who handed out leaflets on the Israel-Palestine issue. He also said, however, that Hanif had believed the "Iraqi situation" to have been "a Zionist conspiracy in a greater Israel, that it was nothing to do with oil or anything like that".

Even less is known about his accomplice, who escaped from the scene leaving his bomb behind him. Sharif's family have fled his home in Derby, making no comment to the press, although neighbours say they were "known to be fundamentalists". It has emerged that for a time he attended the private school, Repton.

From these scant details, it appears that these two young men conformed to the stereotype of the well-educated Islamic fundamentalist who chooses to go down the path of violent confrontation rather than drifting into it. For some, the predominance of the middle classes in such extremism is proof that the concerns of liberals, about global disparity and economic issues being at the root of terrorist activity, are unfounded. The truth, though, is that in this respect, as in so many others, Muslims are no different to anybody else.

There will have been plenty of white students demonstrating around the world yesterday, as the far-left went about the business of marking May Day with action against capitalism. The young and educated are always tremendously keen to "do something" and when they don't we tend to mutter about "student apathy".

Instead, this broader backdrop provides a framework of victimhood for the thinking that leads to intelligent people reaching moronic conclusions about how they can make their beliefs heard.

In an extremely complex world, where few international situations can be said to have single causes or easily identifiable solutions, the free rein that can be given to elaborate theories underpinned with only a trace of truth is almost endless.

Take Hanif's belief that the Iraqi war was all about "Zionist conspiracy in a greater Israel", surely the sort of belief that might have led him into the arms of Hamas. On one level, his belief is contemptible, and the tossing around of such views should have at least raised eyebrows among those who heard them. They didn't, though, because there are circles in which such simplistic nonsense is accepted as being a legitimate opinion.

Furthermore, there is a grain of truth in such assertions, at least insofar as Israel, both vulnerable and aggressive, is always a factor in disputes in the Middle East, while Palestine, which ought to be, often is not. But there are so many other factors too, which various groups latch on to as their simple answer to what is behind absolutely everything.

For some, the war was secretly about Israel, for some it was secretly about oil, for others it was about settling family scores. For yet more it was simply a matter of gaining revenge for 11 September, or securing US global hegemony. For others it was about removing a cruel dictator, and promoting world stability.

Among peace protesters, there was a tendency for different groups to marshal themselves around different issues, failing to see that there was a myriad of motivations behind the war, some of them less honourable than others, but none of them entirely dominant.

I think that the sort of mind which finds itself drawn to violent activism is often one which tries too hard to tie everything together under one category, and is unable to see that linear logic is not going to be useful in understanding situations so fraught with competing motivations. The desire to make the complex simple, I suppose, is what fundamentalism is all about.

Still, somehow, instead of understanding that fundamentalism of all kinds must be approached with caution, those leaders who are most keen to stand against it – President George Bush and Mr Blair – tend to be heavily confrontational. They are unable to see that their own acts of aggression will be used to justify somebody's obsessive and dangerous set of highly specialised beliefs.

It's a paradox of our time, the one that demands we must fight fundamentalism by being fundamentalist, and achieve peace by waging war. Two hot-headed, mis-informed young men went off to Israel in the belief that they would make martyrs of themselves. Instead they have made martyrs not only of the people they killed, but also of the thousands of people who will suffer in all kinds of ways, all over the world, from the hardening of attitudes that their actions will trigger.

d.orr@independent.co.uk