Anyone who thinks Westerners are flocking to Isil because of the Iraq war is a fantasist
by Dr Azeem Ibrahim, Telegraph:
Isil and its jihadist ideology uniquely exploit underlying conflicts and offer the conspiracy theory solution: none of this is your fault.
When Islamist radicals commit some heinous act, they very often try to justify this as a legitimate response to the West’s foreign policy in the Muslim world. The West is the aggressor in “Muslim lands”, oppressing Muslims, so an equally violent response is therefore just and appropriate.
I will start by stating the obvious: Western foreign policy in the Middle East has been hugely dysfunctional, and very frequently responsible for very damaging outcomes. The Iraq War is the paradigm example, but this is something that stretches back an entire century. Yet the notion that people both in the Middle East and in the West get radicalised in response to Western interventions in the Muslim world is nonsense.
This claim is nothing more than a rhetorical pillar for the grievance and victimhood “theology” of jihadism. Its purpose is to give colour to their Manichean black and white, Us vs Them worldview which sustains the most horrific excesses of the terrorists as “necessary” in their millenarian battle of “good” vs “evil”: “They are attacking Us! We are merely defending ourselves! We are the good guys here!” Obviously, they must teach young children to kill with callousness and gratuitous brutality in self-defence.
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