This is pretty depressing — that there are now four times as many Sunni Islamic terrorists than there were on 9/11.
There's plenty of blame to go around, most of it being ladled liberally onto the US, by the article itself ("American policy failures") and its commentariat. One of the commenters, an Aussie I'm sad to say, claims absurdly - and startlingly ignorantly - that there was no terrorism in the decades before the US invasion of Iraq in 2002! (actually 2003). Somehow forgetting about 9/11 itself. Oh, that!!
And as for claims that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 caused the surge in terrorists? I was against the invasion. I remember Colin Powell's presentation of "evidence of WMD" to the United Nations and not being the least convinced by it. And I liked Andrew McCarthy's characterisation, that invading Iraq after 9/11 was "like invading Mexico after Pearl Harbour".
But still, I've learnt since then, that Saddam Hussein had been developing a corps of Islamist holy fighters well before the 2003 invasion. And that would have continued more speedily and unchecked without the invasion. So there's that.
But still: America! America! Amerika! You horrid, horrid, fascist country! You cause of all the world's ills!
Then there's the usual panoply of the Islamic world's "grievances" — Palestine, of course, Syria, Kashmir and the rest. If only these were sorted, terrorism would vanish.
No it would not.
People need to read and re-read the ISIS manifesto: "Why We Hate You, and Why We Fight You" (Dabiq, July 31, 2016). This makes crystal clear that even if every Muslim "grievance" were sorted, Sunni Islamists would still "hate and fight" we non-Muslims. Including non-Sunni Muslims, like the hated Shia. Because we and they are not "believers". Sunni Islamists will fight for Allah and kill for Muhammad until the "end times", grievances or no.
And so, it's depressing that an analysis of Islamist terrorism by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, while mentioning the failure to come to grips with "the causes of terrorism", itself fails even to mention the single most important cause: the ideology of Islam.
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As many as 230,000 Salafi jihadist fighters are operating in nearly 70 countries, a study finds, underscoring terrorist groups' resilience and American policy failures.
