A lot of people won't agree and will say his is a racist explanation. This case is kind of hard to make here; he's a Muslim. They will insist that it is poverty or Palestine or some other root cause. But for a civilization that holds multiculturalism as something on the order of the Ten Commandments, this is being guilty of seeing everything through our own Western eyes.
Among other interesting things, the author says:
Even now, the Muslim Council of Britain adamantly insists that Islam has nothing
to do with the London attacks. It cites other motives "segregation" and "alienation," for instance. Although I don't deny that living on the margins can make a vulnerable lad gravitate to radical messages of instant belonging, it takes more than that to make him detonate himself and innocent others. To blow yourself up, you need conviction. Secular society doesn't compete well on this score. Who gets deathly passionate over tuition subsidies and a summer job?
Reminds me of what Orwell said: "At the time of another war, George Orwell made this point: "The Western democracies [the US and Western Europe], he observed, had come to think that 'human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.' Whatever else could be said about it, fascism was 'psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic concept of life.' Hitler knew that men and women wanted more than 'comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth control.' 'Whereas socialism and even capitalism have said to people "I offer you a good time, "Hitler has said to them, "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result, a whole nation flings itself to his feet." The True and Only Heaven, Christopher Lasche, p. 79."
We don't understand this. It doesn't register with us. But you can't understand the appeal until you understand this fact.
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