Parents and friends comfort each other as they walk away from the scene of the shooting at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse.

Yesterday evening I was leaving the swimming pool when a young girl came running past me in the corridor. She looked not much older than Myriam Monsenego, the young girl executed by Mohammed Merah in Toulouse on Monday, supposedly, because he wanted ‘revenge for Palestinian children.’

Anyone who would extinguish a child’s life in this way is worthy only of the most universal outrage and contempt. It is too early to know what led this self-styled mujahid to carry out this atrocious and despicable crime, or whether his murder spree was really carried out on the instructions of al Qaeda in order to ‘bring France to its knees’ or whether it was the result of the narcissistic cravings of a sociopathic misfit.

The two things are not incompatible. In the savage trajectory that al Qaeda has carved across the world, its operatives have demonstrated time and time again a propensity for murder and violence that is unconstrained by any moral or ethical constraints, whether directed against Jews, Americans, Christians, Shi’a ‘heretics’, or other Muslims.

Killing is in fact the only thing that al Qaeda does well, and over the years it has been able to recruit a number of men like Merah who are willing to do it. Like the ‘shoebomber’ Richard Reid and the Madrid train bombers, Merah appears to fit a similar profile of angry, disaffected and confused men of low intelligence, often with a history of petty criminality and a propensity for haram pleasures such as drugs and nightclubs, followed by a rapid conversion/radicalisation process that culminates in ‘heroic’ homicide.

Merah’s lawyer, who defended him in some of his previous convictions has spoken of his client’s ‘ religious engagement, an increasing hatred against the values of a democratic society and a desire to impose what he believes is truth.’

The Palestinians do not need people like Mohammed Merah to advance their cause and did not ask for their participation. On the contrary, his actions will inevitably be used against them and will provide new justifications for Israeli intransigence – and violence. Never mind that Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has declared that

‘Our people and children condemn with the strongest words possible this criminal terrorism…No Palestinian child can accept crimes against innocent lives…it is time for those criminals to stop using Palestine as the reason for their terrorist acts’.

There are too many people who will not listen to that, and who have already begun to use Merah’s crimes to attack the Palestinians and their supporters, as Melanie Phillips did in typically unhinged fashion in the Mail yesterday, when she accused the media and ‘western progressives‘ of trying to ‘sanitize Muslim genocidal terrorism.‘ Or Robert Spencer’s Islamophobic Jihad Watch website, which claimed yesterday that Merah ‘wanted revenge for fictional atrocities, trumped up by the Palestinian propaganda machine.’

Merah’s crimes will also do nothing but harm to Muslims, both inside and outside France, and are more likely to fan the flames of anti-Muslim hatred and provide grist to the mill of those who seek to paint all Muslims, and Islam itself, as inherently and irredeemably barbaric and extremist.

Both Phillips and Jihad Watch have engaged in what can only be described as unseemly gloating at the suspicions floated in the media before yesterday’s siege began that the murders were carried out by a neo-Nazi or ‘another Anders Breivik’.

But Merah and Breivik are not that entirely dissimilar. Tactically, they both operate according to the same principle of ‘leaderless resistance’ whereby individuals and small groups carry out acts of violence without the need for a hierarchical organizational structure.

Both of them were motivated by extreme and pathological hatred of a particular social or religious group. Both constructed – or made use of – a fantasy version of violence that enabled them to dehumanize even their most helpless and defenceless victims and present the most atrocious acts of murder as heroic, legitimate and necessary acts – at least to themselves.

But Breivik’s murders were an extremist manifestation of essentially racist anti-immigrant politics that depict European Muslims as cultural and religious invaders, engaged in a collective to transform Europe into an Islamic colony. His ’cause’ was a lie and a paranoid delusion.

Al Qaeda, on the other hand, is a parasitical formation that feeds on very real political oppression and injustice, and draws its ability to renew itself and recruit new operatives through the various wars, conflicts and tyrannies in the Muslim world, which it seeks to incorporate into its reactionary Salafist agenda.

In its own eyes, at least, al Qaeda justifies even its most atrocious acts through a crude and primitive moral logic which can be summed up as ’you did this to my people, so I can do whatever I like to yours’ – a philosophy that Osama bin Laden expressed on numerous occasions before he was executed according to a code of ‘justice’ that was no less flawed than his.

This question of legitimacy is crucial. It is not that Merah’s crimes are legitimate in themselves, but such crimes do not spring out of nowhere. Israel does kill Palestinians – both adults and children – with complete impunity, whatever Melanie Phillips and Jihad Watch might say. And when it does, it is secure in the knowledge that its powerful protectors will find excuses for such behaviour or block attempts to hold it to account.

The treatment of the Palestinians is a gross injustice. And as long as this situation persists, there will be those – whatever their individual psychological inclinations and motivations – who will use it as a pretext and justification for barbaric tit-for-tat acts of ‘revenge’.

The murders in Toulouse are also part of a continuum of violence, that includes the Gaza strip, drone strikes in the Pakistan tribal areas, a war in Afghanistan that has descended into routine atrocity, Iraq and Syria. In the same week that Merah began his murder spree, a US Marine – or group of Marines – murdered 16 Afghan villagers, nine of whom were children.

On the same day that Merah attacked the school in Toulouse, dozens of people were killed in coordinated attacks across Iraq on the  anniversary of the 2003 invasion. On 12 March Israeli missile strikes killed 20 Palestinians in Gaza, including a 12-year-old boy.

This is the world that we have created, a world in which extreme violence is used as a routine instrument of statecraft by governments and their adversaries, a world of brutal and brutalising wars and occupations and equally brutal insurgencies, a world where even the most elementary notions of justice and humanity are too often absent and where politics operates at the moral level of the caveman.

This world of violence has also become an all-pervasive media spectacle of cruelty, available through rolling news and the Internet, and Merah had clearly supped deeply on this dank and toxic pool in the road that led this petty criminal to his ‘radicalisation’, and the murders that are likely to be the only reason he is remembered for anything at all.

One woman has told a local French newspaper that she warned police about him years ago, after he forced her son to watch al-Qaeda jihad-porn ‘ in which women were shot and hostages in Afghanistan were beheaded’. 

We may well be revolted by this fascination, but we can only hope that this disgusting episode will galvanize men and women of good will, whatever their background or religious beliefs, to work towards a Europe in which bigotry, fanaticism and racism have no place.

And if we are ever to find a way out of the bloody cycle of war, revenge and murder in which we are currently trapped, we need governments and politicians with the courage and the wisdom to look at the grievances on which organizations like al Qaeda feed, and where possible -to take action to defuse them.

Because it isn’t just the sleep of reason that produces monsters, the absence of justice can produce the same result. And faced – yet again – with actions that shame our species and make a mockery of our common humanity, we must resume the long search for a world in which men like Merah will never be able to present themselves as heroes, and will never be anything more than killers.

Author Matt Carr writes a regular column on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine