We created Islamic extremism: Those blaming Islam for ISIS would have supported Osama bin Laden in the ’80s
No, we did not create ISIL, any way you look at it. The Islamist extremism that motivates current jihadis has existed throughout the entire history of Islam which was born on violent expansionism.
Not that this means all Moslems today--or even most--support terrorism. But it does show that the motivation for jihad springs from their own society, well apart from our interactions with the Islamic world.
We no more created ISIL than we created the Soviet Cold War threat by arming Stalin's USSR during World War II.
And as an aside, I won't blame President Obama for the depravity of our enemies. I may think he could have done a better job of pursuing our interests in Syria and Iraq, but the blame for the violence in Paris and elsewhere is purely on the jihadis and not on our president (and not on so-called global warming that is in its 18th year of pausing regardless of whether it is a real factor blamable on us in the long run) .
Yes, we armed Islamists fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, but that was a risk to defeat the greatest threat to the West we've seen.
And it worked. Whatever level of threat Putin's Russia represents to the West, it is weaker and further east than the Soviet Union was.
Should we have refused to help resistance to the USSR in Afghanistan because those Islamists might later turn on us? And risk the Soviet Union continuing on?
We didn't buy any positive views by helping Moslems throw off Soviet control?
For some, I guess, anything we do in the Moslem world ticks them off.
Should we have refused to help Stalin's resistance to Nazi Germany because those communists might later turn on us? And risk Nazi Germany continuing on?
Whether or not we had armed the Afghan resistance, the jihadi impulse was there and would have appeared regardless of our efforts there. The idea that jihadis not even born when the Afghanistan War raged got worked up over that is ridiculous.
And if that worked them up after all that time, that is a problem, no? Doesn't it suggest that nothing--not even a really splendid outreach speech in Cairo--can tame the jihadi impulse?
Is that the sort of existential conflict that we are in from that alleged Original Sin of America?
This thinking is just nonsense attempting to convince gullible Westerners that we dress slutty and shouldn't walk around at night. We got what we deserved, eh?
If it's not Reagan, it's the crusades. Or the cartoons. Or Guantanamo Bay. Or Iraq. Or just being in Saudi Arabia to help defend them.
What doesn't create jihadis?
The correct response to jihadi attacks on us is not to fixate on whether somebody on the victim side will do something wrong against some innocent person conflated with the jihadis!
Stop the sucker's blame-the-victim game of asking "why do they hate us?" as if we could figure out why we deserve their hate and so end the regrettable but fully understandable justification for slaughtering us at home.
Just ask "why do they hate?" with the proper focus on their failings to enter the modern world that our Secretary of State assures us rejects violence as a foreign policy.
And then ask, "why do we hate us?"
