Khouri, How do Salafist-Jihadists happen? Daily Star, 8/29/2007

August 28, 2007 4:45 pm henrymunsonjr Intolerable Tolerance, Islamism beyond the Shibboleths

Khouri, How do Salafist-Jihadists happen? Daily Star, 8/29/2007

Many in the West allow themselves to see militant Salafist-Jihadists like Fatah al-Islam only through US President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror,” without sufficiently grasping the local and global root causes of radicalism - including American, British and other Western powers’ policies - that are easily traceable in the modern history of the Middle East. On the other hand, those in the Middle East who delight at any sign of indigenous resistance to American-European-Israeli-Arab regime dominance are prone to put up with Salafist-Jihadist criminality as an inevitable reaction to the many malaises of the modern Arab-Iranian-Muslim world.

Neither approach is very useful and only condemns us all to more confrontation, destruction and death. We must understand correctly the root causes that drive the continuing proliferation of groups like Fatah al-Islam, if we hope to nip such criminality in the bud. This particular group will soon be defeated or killed in Nahr al-Bared, but what happens after that?

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