The real cause of Islamic terrorism discovered!

How many times have I pointed out Western intellectuals’ habit of “explaining” Islamic extremism and terrorism through some political or sociological filter familiar to the Western intellectuals themselves, rather than taking the trouble to understand Islamic beliefs and behaviors in their own terms? Here’s the latest such “explanation.” In a paper presented to the British Society of Criminology, Antony Whitehead, a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Huddersfield, said that the London suicide bombers of July 7, 2005 were motivated not by Islam but by the need to prove their masculinity in a consumerist, welfare-state society that undercuts masculinity. This thesis can be seen as a variation on the Olivier Roy thesis, adopted by Francis Fukuyama, that Islamic terrorism is caused by the cultural alienation experienced by Muslim immigrants in Western society. Not only do these brilliant theories reduce Islamic jihidist beliefs to at best a secondary factor in Islamic terrorism; they fail to account for the Muslim terrorists who don’t live in the West.

Which, by the way, proves how narcissistic and Western-centric these thinkers are. They are not interested in understanding any reality outside their own world and the professional language in which they are competent. That way they can “assimilate” all phenomena, including Muslim jihadism and terrorism, into an intellectual and social system familiar to and manageable by themselves. For these intellectuals to acknowledge the particularity, the divinely based authority, and the sheer unassimilable Otherness of Muslim doctrines would mean the end of their liberal, rationalistic world view.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 17, 2006 07:22 AM | Send