There’s a rather good article by Marcus at Harry’s Place about the root causes of terror. He quotes the excellent William Dalrymple, a man who actually understands South Asian Islamic culture.
Marcus’s article does sadly miss the point that, although Muslim extremist groups that wanted to restore the caliphate existed long before the War on Terror, the West’s recent actions have certainly encouraged more people who would otherwise not have joined extremist caliphate-restoring groups to do so.
But that (fairly significant) point aside, good work. Unsurprisingly, he’s already being savaged in the comments by the Little Green Soccer Balls crowd…
Your link is broken – an extra "?" at the end…
Might be a) the question mark at the end (as the url works without) or b) referers from SBBS are banned. Easy to test.
Weird – I added the ? (which doesn’t affect the link) because when I initially linked it came up with a ‘forbidden’ message, but it worked with the ?. Now the opposite – so it sounds like they have blocked referrals. Silly…
Hi-tech solution: click the link then delete the ? to access the actual story.
Clicking on the link from the index page works no problem, but not from the top of the page when you show comments, although the link text appears identical.
Seems to work fine to me. Didn’t we discuss this before, and it’s something to do with your hyphenated name?
Off topic somewhat have you read some of the ‘why we signed’ on the United Against Terror website. It’s strange, I at first thought it was a simple and unequicoval rejection of islamic terrorism. But reading why people signed, it basically is ‘So I can have a go at the left’. Bragg and Pollard are the two main culprits. From their peices you’d have thinkg some Guardinistas (he really said that) had planted the bombs themselves. "Divide Against Terror" might be nearer the mark.
Actually I was too kind. Peter Tatchell appears to have signed it so he can attack Ken Livingstone.
Ken Livingstone won’t sign it because it calls attacks on Israeli civilians terrorism.
Marcus makes the standard HP/DL error. He conflates terror and caliphate ideology. Sure, the ideology is difficult to defeat and impossible to appease by changing a few foreign policies.
Yet the terror is directly related to foreign policies. No terror in Iraq before the war, lots of (suicide) terror after the war. Same Afghanistan. Destabilized by a sequence of wars, produces terrorism. You can fill in Palestine for yourself.
So unless you put your ideological blinders on, reducing terror revolves around wars and foreign policy, i.e. reducing/solving the perceived injustices of those groups that contain elements that resort to (suicide) terror.
A policy prescription that is consistent with problems that don’t feature Islam, like Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka.