The Deceptive Debate Over What Causes Terrorism Against the West
▻https://theintercept.com/2016/01/06/the-deceptive-debate-over-what-causes-terrorism-against-the-west
One hears this all the time from self-defending jingoistic Westerners who insist that their tribe in no way plays any causal role in what it calls terrorist violence. They insist that those who posit a causal link between endless Western violence in the Muslim world and return violence aimed at the West are “infantilizing the terrorists and treating them like children” by suggesting that terrorists lack autonomy and the capacity for choice, and are forced by the West to engage in terrorism. They bizarrely claim — as McFadden did before being fired — that to recognize this causal link is to deny that terrorists have agency and to instead believe that their actions are controlled by the West. One hears this claim constantly.
The claim is absurd: a total reversal of reality and a deliberate distortion of the argument. That some Muslims attack the West in retaliation for Western violence (and external imposition of tyranny) aimed at Muslims is so well-established that it’s barely debatable. Even the 2004 task force report commissioned by the Rumsfeld Pentagon on the causes of terrorism decisively concluded this was the case:
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/01/study-v2.jpg 
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/01/report1.png Beyond such studies, those who have sought to bring violence to Western cities have made explicitly clear that they were doing so out of fury and a sense of helplessness over Western violence that continuously kills innocent Muslims. “The drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody,” Faisal Shahzad, the attempted Times Square bomber, told his sentencing judge when she expressed bafflement over how he could try to kill innocent people. And then there’s just common sense about human nature: if you spend years bombing, invading, occupying, and imposing tyranny on other people, some of them will want to bring violence back to you.
#terrorisme #causes #déni