There was a surreal moment on BBC 1 when Auntie’s early lunchtime News & Weather slot briefly reported today’s press conference by Super-Christians Norman Kember, James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden.

They were gathered in the sight of … who else but the world’s press to plead for the mercy of the court in Baghdad as their abductors prepare to face justice.  Beneath the picture of the three men on my TV a news-text ran horizontally, informing me that: “Iraq hostages forgive their victims”.

Now don’t mock.  This turns out to have been a most fortuitous and accurate mistake.

Forty-five minutes later on the main 1.00pm News, Saint Norman affirmed to a doubting world that his captors were “victims too”.  Therefore he was, he said, in favour of “restorative justice not punitive justice.”  He wants to restore the executioners of Tom Fox to the role of useful members of Iraqi society.

All very fine feeling-wise and wholly according to the personal taste for self-abasement that underpins the doing of God’s work in the Third World.  But, of course, while it is that vain, it is not that simple.  “Forgive them for they know not what they do” is a real problem when you look at it more closely.  Especially when it becomes entangled in the human basement level that is politics.

The belief that men in the plural can be saved from evil - or sin or the Devil or whatever - because, at root, they are a victim of forces larger than themselves falsely excises all real moral responsibility and appends it wholesale to the “forces”.  Thus, the poor, misguided specimens of fallen humanity who shot dead Tom Fox can always raise their eyes to heaven and take that first lonely, fearful step.  They, after all, are victims.  The “forces”, however, are eternally dark, implacably impersonal vessels of worldly evil.  That is so whether they are, in practise, an unjust war waged from Washington or a violent and long-lived local tradition in Mesopotamia.

The excision of responsibility is wrong even on its own terms.  In what way is it God’s work to witness suffering in Baghdad and impute to the sufferers a fitness for pure white raiment, while denying the same to the creatures on Capitol Hill?  What are all these evil forces if not the agencies of imperfect men?  Surely, one man due God’s forgiveness is the same as any other, and if Kember’s idea in going to Iraq was to alleviate the suffering of ordinary people the one effective way is precisely to “turn” the War Party in Washington towards the light.  In other words, it’s politics, stupid.

So, what on earth - for this was earthly - were Abnormal Norm, his homosexual white friend and his brown one, “the future of Canada”, doing with Tom Fox in Baghdad?  I am very sad to say that they were simply indulging their religiosity.  Possibly, some or all of them also sought to be an irritant to the occupying forces, maybe out of a projected self-hatred.  No doubt the four of them did not know what they were doing.  But I am not sure that they should be forgiven, because their actions led to Fox losing his life, his wife her husband and his daughter, Katherine, her father.  It wasn’t an accident.  It wasn’t God’s will.  It was stupidity, stupid.

Before I close, I want to return briefly to forgiveness and its misapplication in political circumstances.  Today the three survivors issued a statement proclaiming that, “We unconditionally forgive our captors for abducting and holding us.  We have no desire to punish them.”

Christian forgiveness always gets a good press (if not at this unholy blog).  It is predicated, of course, on the weakness of normal waking consciousness, and the peculiar psychological suggestibility that accompanies that.  It isn’t, in the spiritual sense, about the doing of bad stuff, and Kember is quite wrong to apply it to some very bad Iraqis as a kind of moral salve.  If it is a salve in any sense at all – and I don’t know that it is - it is still only so within the confines of one’s own psyche.  For forgiveness, read self-knowledge and understanding.

Very plainly, in the world at large – the political world - such a psychological tool has no utility whatsoever.  How, then, should a perfectly worldly and realistic ex-hostage respond to the execution of his friend and co-hostage?  Surely not by some noisy, morally self-aggrandising gesture, but by the humble wish to protect one’s friends and one’s kind from ever venturing close to the same fate.

That sense of connectivity and care particularly extends to the American boys in uniform who are dying pointlessly in Baghdad, too.  I didn’t see too many tears from Kember for them.