The ventriloquism that occurs after terrorist incidents is always striking. Planes fly into towers, trains explode, gunmen run amok torturing and murdering Jews and whatever your particular grievance the terrorists all of sudden become your mouthpiece.

The travel-writer William Dalrymple used the pages of the Observer the Sunday after Mumbai to explain that the perpetrators of the attacks (still, then, unidentified) were "furious at the gross injustice they perceive being done to Muslims by Israel, the US, the UK and India in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir respectively".

On CNN, within hours of the attacks, the Huffington Post's contributor Deepak Chopra said they were the result of the Iraq war and "our foreign policies". Out to the extreme margins, the UK Muslim Public Affairs Committee declared: "Western (often Zionist lobby driven) foreign policy is the root cause of why these young men are taking up arms."

For those of us who note that the terrorists of Mumbai went out of their way to target not only Americans and Brits but also a Jewish centre, the driving force behind these - and jihadi attacks stretching back decades - is perfectly clear. You'd have to be a Channel 4 newsreader or the New York Times to so repeatedly refuse to listen to the terrorists' own reasons for doing what they do - to pretend they do not commit their acts of terror in order to satiate their infidel-hatred, imperial ambitions and caliphate-nostalgia.

Islamic fundamentalism has a propulsion quite of its own. Is our foreign policy a factor? An aggravating one, yes - in that anything we do aggravates them. But let's go all the way. Let's forget the indignity - not to mention long-term risk - of nation-states having their foreign policy dictated by whichever group is most violent. Let's pretend it really is all about our foreign policy.

So what do we do?