Dominic Lawson: So why would people born and bred here want to murder countless other Britons?

If this country had a written constitution, it's almost certain that it would contain the following clause: "When some great outrage occurs, about which the Government can or will do very little, it shall appoint a Commission to investigate and report back at an unspecified date."

Thus it was that Ruth Kelly, who has been given the almost satirical title of Secretary of State for Communities, yesterday launched "The Commission for Integration and Cohesion". She proclaimed that it was necessary, when discussing such matters, "to be unafraid to say, plainly, the pragmatic truth".

She herself, however, found it impossible to admit the plain pragmatic truth: that the timing of her initiative was a direct response to the alleged plot by British Muslims to blow up a number of jets travelling from London to the United States. This is, after all, the question that any intelligent person has been asking ever since the tube and bus bombings of 7/7: what has gone so wrong with our country that young men born and bred here, who have been educated by this state and no other, should want to kill themselves and murder countless other fellow Britons?

As a former education secretary, it was natural that Ruth Kelly should seek to find part of the answer in the education system. It's true that the separateness of ethnic and religious communities is rigidified and reinforced by the fact that within the same cities there will be some schools where all the pupils are white, and others where all the pupils are of Asian descent.

In her speech yesterday Ms Kelly singled out for praise "school twinning programmes and sporting events that focus on children mixing at an early age". Here again, she missed the opportunity to state the plain pragmatic truth.

The solution to this problem must involve bussing, just as the United States did to ensure racial desegregation in their schools. But the diversity industry, led chiefly by Labour local authorities, regards such actions as anathema; these are the same officials who strain every bureaucratic sinew to thwart white parents from adopting children who are not themselves white. Even if the inner-city local authorities broke off their infatuation with ghettoes, it is obviously not the case that they would have ended the risk of young men trying to become jihadist martyrs. The causes are far more complex than that.

The "martyrdom videos" left behind by two of the 7/7 bombers gave the now standard explanation: that they were acting in retaliation for the British military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Government is simply being perverse when it claims, in effect, that these men are lying in their testaments for posterity - that its foreign policy has nothing to do with their vengeful suicides.

On the other hand, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, a Pakistan-born convert to Anglicanism, was also right when he said last week that "Islamic radicalism did not begin with Muslim grievances over Western foreign policy. It has deep roots going back to the 13th century". Nazir-Ali went on to say that, in the modern era, "The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan gave it the cause it was looking for." That, certainly, was what radicalised a young Saudi called Osama bin-Laden.

Bin Laden is, perhaps, the world's leading exponent of what British counter-terrorism experts call "The Single Narrative." The single narrative goes - roughly - like this: Muhammad is the Prophet to whom God's words were, uniquely, revealed. It was necessary to fight with the Christians and Jews to make sure that God's law prevailed on earth. But once those forced to convert at the point of the sword got used to the new state of affairs, they realised that they were much happier as Muslims. Thus Islam was able to take over much of the globe, including southern Spain. Then the Crusaders set out to reconquer for Christianity not just Andalucia but even the sacred soil of the Arabian Peninsula, where the Prophet lived and taught.

The Crusaders of the modern era are just as bad: they installed puppet regimes in the Gulf - such as the Saudi royal family - and now they are using direct force of arms to control Muslim countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Only a jihadist campaign can return these lands to the true path of peace and submission to Allah. Anyone killed in taking action to bring that about is a martyr, who, in the words of bin Laden himself, "will be shown his seat in paradise, wedded to 72 of the purest Houris and his intercession on behalf of 70 of his relatives will be accepted".

Part of the potency of the Single Narrative is that it contains elements of truth: for example, it is true that the Americans and the British organised the plot which ousted the Iranian elected leader Mossadeq, who had nationalised the formerly western-controlled oil industry, and replaced him with Shah Reza Pahlavi.

But even if you believed everything that Osama bin Laden says, including the bit about the 72 houris, could you imagine blowing not just yourself up, but also committing mass murder of innocent people? However much righteous rage you might feel from time to time, can you really imagine being prepared to carry out such a monstrous act? And yet, to truly understand the reasons for such actions, it is absolutely necessary to know what psychological forces motivate the perpetrators.

In order to do that, I had a conversion with a recently retired member of the anti-terrorist squad who had read all the documents which attempted to divine some pattern of character among the British Islamist martyrs and would-be martyrs.

According to him, these tended to be young men from perfectly ordinary homes who had "got religion in a big way". But it was wrong, he said, to put the blame simply on "radical preachers in mosques".

These men had often rejected their local mosques, and got their destructive theories straight from the internet. They are men who feel in some way let down by society, that they do not have the recognition they crave. At the same time they have a strong sense of superiority, and a desire for control.

This may seem like psychobabble, but if you look at the martyrdom video of the 7/7 bomber Shehzad Tanweer, you can see the finger-jabbing cockiness of an insignificant man knowing that he had finally made the big time. It's a horrible thought: that these people are the radical Islamic equivalent of Big Brother auditioners. In other words, while their justifying arguments may stem from medieval Arabia, they themselves are uniquely modern and profoundly British.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk