Thomas Friedman has psycho-analysed the Islamist worldview before, but it's always worth hearing him re-state his conclusions:
Part of what seems to be going on with these young Muslim males is that they are, on the one hand, tempted by Western society, and ashamed of being tempted.
The combative Gerard Baker prefers to ponder the mysteries of the British left-liberal mind-set. He detects another, more genteel form of self-hatred behind the anguished cries of "Why do they hate us?":
This English self-loathing would be less objectionable if it had not been so prominent in its less virulent form, in so much British policy and public life, for the past 60 years. In its less virulent form, it was the driving force behind the misguided anything-goes multiculturalism of the 1960s and 1970s and the desire to shed vestiges of British or English nationalism within the European Union for 40 years now.
Especially curious is that it is an oddly British, or perhaps Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. The French elites certainly don’t succumb to it, or the Russian, or the Chinese, though all three of them have a fair bit to answer for in their own histories.
And that’s the irony: the most painful irony of all in this English self-loathing is this simple truth. The beauty of human freedom that so many in the world now enjoy, the wonder of so much prosperity, the legacy of the Enlightenment, the very principles of cultural and political tolerance and free inquiry, owe more to Britain, and latterly our Anglo-Saxon allies who have taken on the baton in the past century, than to any other country on Earth.