Tambourine Man wrote:
By that logic more Muslims suffer from mental illness than any other group of people because they commit acts like in far greater numbers than any other group. I don't buy that, they tell us exactly why they do they things do but we look beyond the veil for different explanations.
Why don't you buy it? Muslims come far more frequently from marginalised, oppressed or war-torn communities.
It's easy see those communities have become that way due to the tortuous geopolitics of territorial control, shipping channel control, and resource extraction through the twentieth century.
As well as the fifty year standoff between the West and communism, in which "political Islam" was allowed to run unchecked because it was a useful counterweight to potentially troublesome movements like pan-Arabism.
Yes, ideology plays a part. But it's far, far less than people love to think. Ideology is not an instrument of mass control so much as a trigger or enabler for the statistically guaranteed pathologies of a minority of already severely damaged people.
Look at the Kouachi brothers, or Abdelhamid Abaaoud. All three "radicalised" in and out of the prison system, dysfunctional families, drug use, aberrant and violent behaviour, members of stigmatised and socially excluded communities.
It's always convenient to attribute what you don't understand to some transcendent "essence" of race, culture or religion. At the end of the day you're better off following the money.
