You make it sound like those are increasingly smaller concentric circles, when in fact they are partially overlapping Venn diagrams.
France was bombing ISIS when ISIS attacked Paris. And France has the same colonial imperial sins as the rest of the west.
That said, it’s obviously also somewhat about western culture. I’m not doubting that. But your claim that the political is pretextual doesn’t have much evidence to back it, and would be clearer if you limited yourself to discussing particular groups.
This “hopelessness” argument has always struck me as silly. The San Bernardino shooter was a Cal State graduate with a cushy government job. The Ohio State University attacker had been accepted as a transfer student to Ohio State. The Fort Hood shooter was a major in the US Army. If privilege is a real thing, these guys had it coming out their asses.
“Americans actually killed in terror attacks” is a TERRIBLE measure for “What really helps terrorist groups to recruit?” There are tons of factors that affect the casualties of a terrorist attack that tell us virtually nothing about terrorist organization’s recruitment. I actually think the given FBI arrests (or perhaps convictions) is a significantly better measure.
Re: ISIS specifically, recall that France began airstrikes on ISIS in September 2015. The coordinated Paris attacks came in November 2015. ISIS could hardly launch retaliatory airstrikes, so they did what they could.
I read an article several years ago that said prisons in middle eastern nations were a major source of recruitment. That is where opponents of the regimes of the middle east would be converted to radical islamic thinking for various reasons (rage over being tortured, because islamic extremism was the only source of political opposition to the regimes, etc).
Resistance movements are worldwide. Resistance movements with the level of depravity we’ve seen out of ISIS and Al Qaeda is rare. While I don’t doubt Westerners would take up arms at such provocations, I doubt many would have much taste for attacks on soft targets.
But I care about preventing the non-fatal terrorist attacks too. I don’t consider the Ohio State University attack, or the Underwear Bomber, to be brilliant successes of our security apparatus. They were failures (at least at the screening / prevention stage), but fortunately they were failures in which nobody died (except the terrorist). We shouldn’t rely on that good fortune in the future, but instead focus our efforts on ways of preventing even those non-fatal terrorist attacks.
Totally fair. Then I think we have a suitable compromise. We should measure terrorist attacks carried out to (attempted) fruition, regardless of fatalities.
What I think we ought not count is when the FBI finds a mentally deranged 20-something and goads him into some fantastical, impossible plot and then arrests him when he tries to buy laser beams to blow up the space station.
Agreed. There are a fair number of FBI cases that consist of what-most-people-would-call-entrapment. That’s true of some of the other (non-terrorism) cases law enforcement makes too. Then there are some (relatively few, IMO) where they actually do seem to stumble on an honest-to-goodness terror plot still in the planning stage and bust it up beforehand. The latter should be celebrated as successes, the former not so much.
There’s an old joke I’ve heard from conservative militia-types (that probably applies at least as much to Muslims these days):
Q: How do you know who the Fed in your group is?
A: He’s the guy that always wants to blow stuff up.
I think Americans tend to have a skewed view of just how pissed off people get when foreigners kill people on their native lands. Because we kill people globally on an industrial basis and have for decades we look on that as run of the mill if the US kills XY and Z “bad guys” in Stanstanistan because…reasons.
When Americans are killed in the US, not by a foreign nation, but by a bunch of rogue terrorists we lose our fucking minds, throw out all human rights for people we ever professed to, invade countries at will, and get busy with torture and locking up 12 year olds for years and years.
Outside of our own bubble of preening self regard we could easily be regarded as kinda-sorta violent assholes by peoples of other nations where we are stomping around .
So is being nice to terrorists going to work? No it’s a “to the death” culture war but we should not be precious about why we are disliked. We do some obnoxious shit especially with respect to giving cover to Israel for some of it’s defacto apartheid policies. We need to kill terrorists but we also need to own the real politick nature of the conflict. Our hands are not clean.
I suspect that terrorists, like criminal gangs in general, mostly recruit young males who are bored and idle.
Whenever you read up on a young Muslim terrorist in Europe, you tend to hear his neighbors say, “Ali? A terrorist? But… he wasn’t religious. He NEVER went to the mosque. He NEVER kept halal. He spent all his time playing video games, watching porn and smoking pot!”
Young Arabs in the banlieues outside Paris generally AREN’T politically sophisticated. They generally AREN’T ideologically or religiously driven. They’re mostly losers (or guys who feel like losers) who have nothing going for them in life, and are just dying to do something cool, something that MATTERS.
Unemployment and the dole feed the ISIS recruitment pipeline more than the Koran does, more than Guantanamo and Abu Ghiraib do.
I mean, it’s all of this, right? Just like any other area of human experience, different people do it for different reasons–and even specific individuals might have diverse motivations. It’s a mistake to try to find the one true reason and ignore the others.
In my view, it’s a mistake to ignore the religious aspect. It really is the case that ultraconservative (and quite modern) interpretations of Islam have contributed to terrorism. It’s also the case that political grievances have contributed. It’s also the case that economic grievances have contributed. It’s also the case that the fracturing of Arab nationalisms and vacuum of identity for young men in some of these places contributed. Blah blah blah.
What people get wrong is thinking that any of these is the only game around, or that any one of them doesn’t matter. They all matter.
ISTM that the primary cause of terrorism is wanting something that cannot be achieved through peaceful means, or would take far too long to achieve to be satisfactory.
Hence why democracy doesn’t do much good for thwarting terrorism. What good does it do to live in a democratic country, if you want to bend a country to your will but your cause would never get more than 1% of the vote?
I’d also guess that democratic means don’t give the visceral satisfaction of watching one’s enemies get blown to pieces either; out-voting one’s enemies is not at all like inflicting violent suffering on them.
What Islam does is offer a shortcut to doing something that matters. They can either study the Koran and become personally pious or they can commit jihad and become a good muslim that way. These young men have an identity crisis and want to do something significant and terrorism appeals to them because it is exciting and violent and does not need the discipline of actual piety.
The failure to close Guantanamo is squarely on republicans. Obama tried to close it. Indeed it was one of the first things he did in office but republicans blocked it. So it remains as a sore spot in the Middle East and likely contributes to recruitment efforts.
The withdrawal of troops from Iraq was negotiated and agreed to under Bush. Obama just abided by the agreement negotiated by a previous administration which is normal.
All you have left is Obama would not say certain phrases. That’s pretty thin.