We are dealing with a very different beast than we have ever confronted before in modern history.
As a follow-on from my recent Australian Conservative article, 9/11 Retrospective – Islam: ‘religion of peace’ or ideology of terror, I thought it might be instructive to explore this issue from the perspective of some of the writers on this topic in the West, who persist in looking at the issue from a “culturally relativist” perspective and literally “bend over backwards” to ascribe the cause of Islamic terrorism to the “alienation” of modern Muslims.
While it is certainly laudable to endeavour to build an approach around the maintenance of the rights to freedom of speech and religious tolerance, we saw in the last article that it is impossible to effectively deal with the issue of “Islamic terrorism” without understanding both “terrorism” and “Islam”, and their implications when taken together, since “Islamic terrorism” is a unique, albeit not a new, phenomenon.
Many modern Western writers, such as Mazarr, argue that “alienation, frustration and anger” in response to the effects of modernity are a major source of Islamic terrorism, but analysis shows us immediately that these arguments are weak because they are essentially subjective, not based on any substantive empirical evidence or data, and are also heavily rooted in a cultural relativism which appears wilfully blind to the real cultural divide between fundamentalist Islam and the West, and which is in fact at the real root of this dilemma.