violence and equivalence - 2 different takes from grauniad today

Hanif Kureishi, writing about religion and war says:

"We like to believe we are free to speak about everything, but we are reluctant to consider our own deaths, as well as the meaning of murder. Terrible acts of violence in our own neighbourhood - not unlike terrible acts of violence which are "outsourced", usually taking place in the poorest parts of the third world - disrupt the smooth idea of "virtual" war that we have adopted to conquer the consideration of death."

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | The arduous conversation will continue

This contrasts in its wisdom with the equivalence which Martin Kettle uses to criticise the "useful idiots" who justify domestic violence...

Guardian Unlimited | Columnists | Useful idiots have always apologised for terrorists: "It would be reckless and wrong to say that violence in 1968 was endemic. Yet violence was widespread, not just in the form of American bombing of Vietnam, but in the tactics adopted, and widely celebrated, by significant parts of the counterculture. In the May events, Paris explicitly re-embraced its own tradition of violence. In this country, the prosperous duo of Mick Jagger and Tariq Ali each celebrated not peaceful protest but street fighting. In America, the rhetoric, and even the action, was hotter. 'It's a wonderful feeling to hit a pig,' the student leader Mark Rudd told the Weathermen conference in 1969. 'It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building.'"