After Philip Adams, Margo Kingston is the journalist Australian bloggers love to hate, though she is not without able defenders. The debate has now spilled over into the comments thread of one of my posts and been linked to by Margo’s blog nemesis, Tim Blair. So I guess it’s time for me to wade into the fray.

An added incentive is that, according to Tim, Bob Carr’s attack on Margo has been based on the arguments of Mark Steyn. As regular readers will know, I’ve appointed myself as Steyn’s nemesis, with a so-far unanswered challenge to his fans to produce a single article that doesn’t contain either a gross factual error, a plagiarised/distorted quote or an obivous distortion of the truth. As it happens I’ve already met this challenge for the piece referred to by Carr, which asserted that Sinn Fein (and not the Real IRA) was responsible for the Omagh bombing, but the attack on Margo Kingston gives an opportunity for bonus points.

The Steyn piece has been moved to the Oz archives, but I found a link to another version here. You can then look at Margo’s article and see if she was making any assertion about root causes. It begins

There is no meaning yet. We don’t yet know for sure what happened. We don’t know who did this. We don’t know why

and ends

Will we now swing behind war with Iraq or pull out and focus on our home? The Pacific. South East Asia. East Timor, especially, where we’re protecting a baby, Christian democracy. The places where we have duties and responsibilities and, in the end, where our self interest lies. I don’t know.

Arguably, Margo would have been better off waiting to clarify her thoughts before writing anything on the subject*, but this isn’t always an option for a working journalist. In any case, I much prefer her honest confusion (which, in the immediate aftermath, I shared) to the heresy-hunting that marred so much of the reaction to Bali, including Tim Blair’s, which spoiled, for me, some great and impassioned writing.

The fact is, as most sensible people have now conceded, that the ability of terrorist organisations to recruit members and maintain significant popular support is rooted in things like poverty and dictatorship. This doesn’t mean that individuals become terrorists because they are poor or that anything we can do will appease the hardcore members of Al Qaeda. But you only have to look at the loss of support for the IRA in the Republic of Ireland after it joined the EU to see that prosperity and national optimism cause a rapid loss of interest in historical and religious grievances.

* Not that this would necessarily protect her. I refrained from putting forward any analysis for some days, but even my expression of sympathy for the victims and their families copped a heresy ticket from an American warblogger (Asparagirl) because I mentioned that we should remember other grieving families as well.