The most important conclusion to be drawn from the bombers’ banal backgrounds is that these killings should be treated as pure criminal acts with no political significance whatsoever. The only point of trying to understand the political or religious motivations of the bombers is to identify and pursue any accomplices, a task that is best left to police and forensic psychologists. For politicians, media commentators and community leaders to try to understand or explain the killers’ motives is not only to glamorise these suicidal misfits as religious or political martyrs, but also to mislead ourselves about the true reasons for their acts.

Osama bin Laden has a philosophy which, however deranged and repugnant, is genuinely important in trying to explain and anticipate his actions. But the four young Muslims who made a suicide pact and decided to take 60 Londoners with them, are best compared to the random psychopathic killers who shoot their way to brief notoriety in every advanced society from time to time.

In this sense, the most useful analogue for last week’s outrage in London may not be September 11 or even the bombing of Madrid last year, but the worst act of terrorism in postwar Western history before September 11: the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people in 1995. Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator, was, like the London bombers, a small-time loser who felt he was acting out of intense ideological and religious motives. He was a fervent white supremacist and belonged to an extensive network of neo-Nazi fanatics who are generally believed to number many thousands across the US. His commitment to an essentially religious doctrine — that a global Jewish conspiracy, using African-Americans as their subhuman foot-soldiers, was taking over the world and preparing to exterminate or enslave all white Christians — was every bit as sincere as the faith and “piety” of many jihadist terrorists.

After McVeigh’s arrest, thousands of heavily armed neo-Nazis quite like him continued to live in the mountains of Idaho and Utah and the hills of Missouri (and live there to this day), yet the Oklahoma atrocity was not repeated. Partly this may have been because McVeigh was treated as a common criminal after his capture, not as the standard-bearer of a politico-religious movement. There was, of course, intense interest in McVeigh’s background and motivation, but it focused almost entirely on his psychological aberrations, not on his politics or religion. Instead of appearing as a glamorous martyr, McVeigh came across as a lonely loser, a pathetic embarrassment to his family and all who knew him, rather than a role model for other rebellious youths.

It certainly did not occur to anyone after the Oklahoma bombing to apologise for the racial desegregation which had provoked the American neo-Nazis and their ideological antecedents, the Ku Klux Klan. Nobody suggested abolishing affirmative action or banning Jews from public office on the grounds that racial mixing and the prominence of Jews was angering white supremacists and acting as “a recruiting sergeant” for more neo-Nazi terrorists who might copy McVeigh.

Should the political sensitivities and religious aspirations of jihadist killers be treated with any greater respect? The answer is clearly, no.

But if a studied, contemptuous indifference is the right response to the personal motivations of Britain’s home-grown jihadists, this does not mean that public policy should do nothing in the face of their psychopathic acts. The obvious responses are the same as they were after Oklahoma — more security and surveillance and better infiltration of domestic extremist groups, which should be easier than the infiltration of foreign jihadist movements. Above all there must be a rock-solid commitment to give no quarter to any of the terrorists’ alleged grievances or ideological demands.

Morally, today’s Muslim extremists must be put exactly on a par with neo-Nazis. Their violence and hatred may be motivated by deep philosophical convictions and a genuine sense of grievance, but the same was true of Hitler. Thus the soul-searching and debate that Britain — and the rest of the modern world — must undertake about the religious sensitivities of Muslim extremists is not about how to accommodate them but how to isolate them completely from the mainstream of Muslim thinking, which is compatible with peaceful coexistence alongside other cultures in the modern world. To do this jihadism must be recognised explicitly as exactly equivalent to the neo-Nazi movement, even if it manifests itself as sincere religious belief.

The serious response to the jihadists’ religious demands should be to trace them back to their source in the Wahhabi religious schools of Saudi Arabia, with their exaltation of death and martyrdom. For Saudi princes to support religious charities and schools that extol martyrdom — or for British mosques to accept money from such Saudi charities — must become as shameful as it would be for Alabama politicians to remain KKK members or for German political parties to take donations from self-confessed followers of Adolf Hitler.

Just as conservative America totally isolated the white supremacists and neo-Nazis after the bombings in Oklahoma, the rational Muslim community in Britain must be forced to reject completely the small minority of Wahhabi fanatics who boast that they “love death”. Only then can there be any hope of restoring respect for human life in the Islamic community and reducing the concept of martyrdom to what it really amounts to: a sad, lonely and utterly futile suicide.

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