[Itse]

Originally Posted by nik-

What? No, it wasn't sarcastic, I'm saying that no one here is saying what you're implying in your post.

Yeah I got that now, I just wasn't sure. No offense meant.

I was speaking in generalities as a result of scope. Terrorist organizations obviously exist elsewhere, but I think it's pretty clear what the common denominator is for the vast majority of present day groups, and it's not colonialism.

Logic 101: Correlation does not mean causation.

If Islam generally speaking played a significant part in breeding terrorism, then the majority of terrorists throughout history should logically have been Muslims. Also, if the incompatibility of Islam and "modern Western values" was the problem, then again this type of terrorism in the West should have started decades earlier than it has happened. A quick fact check shows that neither is the case.

Therefore logic says that Islam does not appear to be a significant contributing factor.

There are also other common denominators we can look into. Distrust of authorities (usually for good reason), poverty, hopelessness. People are acting as if terrorism was some new phenomenon that we know nothing about, when in fact it has been long studied in many countries. None of the studies suggest that the contents of a religion are a significant contributing factor. (It can be a diminishing factor though, as there are religious minority groups that are clearly anti-violent.)

Again: attacks like this started years after the West declared the general Muslim population to be a security threat.

Also, if you're looking at where these strikes are happening, they have not been happening in every country with a significant Muslim population. They have not even been happening in every country that has taken part in the wars in the Middle East, or in every country with lots of poor Muslim.

The common denominators are large populations of Muslims living in poverty and alienated from the general population, and the police forces of those countries being well known to not respect civil rights during terrorism investigations, plus politically sizable nationalist movements.

In short: poverty, hopelessness, alienation, disrespect of civil rights and nationalistic hatred and fearmongering directed at minorites breeds terrorism. So if you really want to be against terrorism, stop fearmongering against Muslims, demand that civil rights of terror suspects are respected and demand that politicians address the issues of widespread poverty.

These are solutions that are known to work. "The War on Terror" on the other hand only increases terrorism, which has been admitted even by the Western intelligence agencies.