And what about Ram’s attacker, Clarke Pearce? An innocent victim is a seldom a man who corners someone in a restaurant and stabs him twice in the wrist with a broken wine glass. Pearce died, allegedly, after he refused treatment from a female doctor and pulled out the drips that were being used to treat him before discharging himself and dying later at home. You will forgive me, if my sympathies rest with the “murderer” and not the “victim” this time.The fact is that for many British Asians Satpal is a community hero, having shown the strength of character in his fight for justice to shatter once again the myth of the passive, subservient Asian. Yes, multicultural Britain has seen many positive changes during the 15 years that Satpal has been incarcerated. But as I mentioned earlier, a basic understanding of what happened to Satpal Ram will probably hit home even more.We need to know just how an injustice such as this can happen in our multicultural “civilised society”. Satpal Ram was strong enough to highlight his plight, but he is unlikely to be the last to do so.The writer is the editor of ‘Asian Xpress’. As a bald statement of consequences, free of all history and context, it is so unexceptionable and self-proving as to be without meaning.

“As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up, you are never going to make progress.” Step forward whoever believes that as long as young people have got no hope but to blow themselves up, we are making excellent progress. Why stop at young people? Surely as long as any people – the middle-aged, the elderly, the geriatric – have got no hope but to blow themselves up, we are not making progress. Unless you would argue that in the case of the geriatric we are making progress, since their blowing themselves up in large numbers would be some sort of solution to the problem of an ageing population. That is as long as they are only blowing themselves up, and not indiscriminately blowing up other people along with them.

It begs a question, you see, this phrase “blowing themselves up”. Indeed, it doesn’t only beg a question, it buries it.Try the sentence again, then, paying more attention to the specifics. If it is tragic for one young person to be without hope, surely it is still more tragic for another young person to be without life, especially as the decision to be without life is not one he has reached in the extremity of his own hopelessness, but is thrust upon him.The English language is subtle enough to make all the necessary distinctions A suicide kills himself A murderer kills other people. A murderer who chooses to kill himself in the process is no less a murderer Even-handedness of sympathy is not the issue here.

We do not need to be told later, by way of redress, that Cherie Blair is a staunch supporter of the State of Israel. You fix the problem in the text itself – the text being an indicator of the mind, and the mind an indicator of the sympathies – by not omitting to mention that it was first and foremost murder to which the latest Palestinian depressive was driven.Terrible to be so driven, terrible indeed, but let us properly name the deed he was driven to.Which brings us to the assumption – almost an id?fixe now, in some quarters – that between hopelessness and murder there is no moral or behavioural transition worth talking about. No hope but to – how trippingly off the tongue that comes. How trippingly off the tongue it has been coming since 11 September, when the world woke to many surprises, not the least of them being a whole new system of measuring longevity of suffering and patience People were fed up People had had enough.