A post in Foreign Policy’s blog this week entitled “Here come the blonde, blue-eyed terrorists?” makes much of the “Aryan”-looking German converts to Islam making it into the terrorists’ ranks. I don’t know that it’s such a new phenomenon (plenty of Caucasian-like terrorists in the past, and indeed if you look beyond Islamic terrorism, plenty of Caucasian terrorists), but I must say that for this anti-racist atheist, this new focus heralds a hope that attention will be shifted from ethnicity (e.g.: “Arabs”) to religion (e.g.: “Islam”) as the excuse for terrorism. Not that I think like some of the anti-religious crowd that religion necessarily breeds violence -I actually get on better with many religious moderates than with a number of fellow atheists; and I’m only too aware that I must be compensating for the lacking irrationality of religion in many ways- but I do think that it’s a bad excuse, since its premises are wholly mistaken.