A nihilistic attack on the modern world.

When the Iraqi-born, British-educated Swede Taimour Abdulwahab blew himself up on a Stockholm street teeming with Christmas shoppers on the day before his twenty-ninth birthday, the international image of Sweden as an open, neutral and fairly harmonious nation imploded, too. After all, back in 2004 Osama bin Laden himself said al-Qaeda would not ‘strike Sweden’ because it is not part of what he sees as the crusading West.

Luckily, Abdulwahab, like his predecessors the pantsman and the shoe bomber, was utterly incompetent and so he was the only fatality in the incident. Unsurprisingly, though, his bombs have triggered a lot of national soul-searching in Sweden. ‘What went wrong?’, many are now asking.

What is shocking is that many commentators are actually taking the crackpot Abdulwahab’s self-confessed motivations seriously and are suggesting that it was only a matter of time before Sweden felt the force of Muslim anger. Some are even suggesting that Swedes’ attitudes to Muslims drove him to this desperate act.

In an email sent to a Swedish news agency just minutes before he set fire to his car and then, seemingly prematurely, triggered a bomb wrapped around his waist, Abdulwahab wrote: ‘Thanks to Lars Vilks and his paintings of the Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him, and your soldiers in Afghanistan and your silence on all this so shall your children, daughters, brothers and sisters die in the same way as our brothers and sisters and children die.’

Some Swedish commentators have suggested that not only are these sentiments understandable, but that they also explain why Abdulwahab sought revenge on behalf of his ‘brothers and sisters’ by attempting to kill and maim scores of Stockholmers out buying Christmas presents for their friends and families.

Considering Western countries’ discrimination against Muslims at home and support for the ‘American crusade’ in Afghanistan, suggested one leading columnist, it is not hard to see why some self-styled martyrs would want to ‘hit back’. Similarly, two human rights activists wrote that ‘we have to remind ourselves that we have, after all, chosen to send troops abroad to participate in armed conflicts’.