[Itse]

Originally Posted by nik-

Do you honestly believe the people driving these movements aren't familiar with their religion? Not every foot soldiers but the leadership and a large component of the fighters. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is an islamic scholar. Al-Zawahiri was devout since he was a child.

You're basically ignoring what they themselves are stating in order to deflect the possibility that they are finding their path in their religious texts.

I think misunderstand my point. It's not that there are no religiously motivated terrorists who truly believe that what they do is the the gods will. Of course there are. That just does not mean that there is something about the general faith of Islam that creates them, in comparison to other mainstream religions and many secular ideologies (such as nationalism, fascism and communism).

It's also not that there's no s*** parts in Islamic texts. It's that it doesn't seem to make a difference in comparison to other religions. According to science. I'm not just making this stuff up.

IMO it's also relevant that pretty much all these new radical Islamist terrorist organizations follow a single relatively small fundamentalist branch of Islam called Wahhabism (or Salafism), which is a relatively recent development within Islam.

Many in the Muslim world are saying that Wahhabism is a genuine problem, and that I tend to agree with. And btw, I do think that the kind of people in the west who know enough about Islam to make that disctinction also tend to be the kind of liberals that are super uncomfortable about the idea of blaming a certain branch of religion.

But then again, I think a larger reason for why there is no major discussion on Wahhabism in the west is that most people don't know enough or don't care to make that distinction.

As for the bold. What? This is just patently dishonest.

That claim is backed by a paper on the commonly shared views of the scientific community in this topic that I linked to this thread. It's not my opinion, I was simply pointing out a fact.

You can of course claim that the research must be wrong. I agree that this is a possibility.

I'm sure you'll relink your picture of the terrorists deaths in Europe again implying that Basque terrorists, IRA etc were just as bad because many people were killed by them. Which totally ignores the disparity in comparable timespans (40+ years compared to like 20)

It was a decade-by-decade presentation, so I fail to see how what you say is possible.

and the radical advances in surveillance and technology.

According to the US governments own analysis...

(as reported here for example)

NSA's dragnet domestic surveillance "had no discernible impact" on preventing terrorist acts. Instead, the majority of threats over the last decade were detected by regular old intelligence and law enforcement methods—tips, informants, CIA and FBI ops, routine law enforcement.

It also ignores that the majority of attacks come in the Muslim world itself.

This is true. However, that strengthens my point.

You can argue that the increase of Muslims is a reason why terrorism has increased in Europe, and that it proves that there is something wrong with Islam.

However, that same explanation can not possibly be true for the Muslim world. They've all been Muslims for hundreds of years. There must be something else going on there.

(Plus let's remember there has been no shortage of terrorism in the Middle East at least since the Zionists started to fight for control of Palestine in the 1920's.)