Gurgen wrote:
Criticising religious ideas is not the same as racism. And you didn't answer my question. My question was why other disenfranchised groups do not commit terrorist acts on the same scale.
6th-7th C AD: Islam comes into being.
1970s: first "Islamist terror attack", well after the commencement of the current long term geopolitical struggle for the Middle East.
Most in the 80s and 90s were connected to the Lebanese Civil War (and by proxy to Hezbollah and Iran's religious revolution).
Around this time Al-Qa'eda was becoming active—a terrorist organisation, backed by Saudi money in some cases, and led by military cadres like Bin Laden who had been formed in the crucible of anti-Soviet struggle while allied with American intel and military operations.
Then you had 9/11 and the commencement of bona fide Islamophobia in the west, led and propagated by a broadsheet onslaught about the "clash of civilisations" including, of course, numerous books by hawkish New Atheists.
The response to 9/11 has been a series of brutal military interventions that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and destabilised the entire Levant, displacing millions of people and plunging millions more into famine and long term political uncertainty.
Meanwhile the politics of fear and hate have seen incessant, alienating Muslim-baiting in western politics and media, from legislative measures (eg burka or veil bans) to procedural measures (new immigration tests, executive bans) to straight-up hatred and exclusion.
The consequence of this has been a series of attacks made by people of Muslim religion (or in some cases, just "Middle Eastern appearance"). Some have been archetypal angry loners with little knowledge of Islam at all, some have been radicalised by internet communications, and others have actually had material contact with groups like ISIS.
But what is absolutely certain is that until the 1990s, groups like this did not even exist, there was no "homegrown terror", so where does this leave the theory that "Islam causes terrorism"? Islam has been around since 600AD.
If we are to pursue a dumb reduction (and I question whether we should) let's instead say that invading and destroying countries causes terrorism. It would be far less dumb.
TL;DR: diffuse acts of violence around the developed world disproportionately feature Islamic protagonists because in the 21C, the world's worst conflict zones are Muslim majority nations—a fact that has much less to do with Islam than it does with energy and geopolitical history.
