People of the left, which includes all this politically correct rubbish, have a certain ideological and philosophical framework of seeing the world and how it works; how people psychologically function and act etc. Prof Davey's assessment typified this attitude and it is wrong. They totally underestimate how the interaction of religion (what I see as the unconscious) and cultural life and daily needs etc. interplay with each other. They are also myopic about how they affect people with their stupid and 'good intentions' policies, by just blundering into peoples lives and cultural perspectives.
JK - I find your comments bizarre.
The usual criticism of the left is that they are all soft and goody goody, allowing terrorist acts to be explained away on the basis of something that we'd done to them, that it is all justified on the basis of what we've done to them rather than their underlying idealogy - but I haven't done that, but someone else has:
'The root of all this goes back decades and further to the policies and actions of the West; specifically the US. The ideology is just a tag on to promote the cause of their hate of the West to the Islamic world.'
That statement comes from you JK and is almost classic of the kind that is often attributed to those on the left and dismissed by those on the right.
I think the underlying cause is ideology and it is a battle of ideologies, but not fundamentally a battle between islam and the west. Nope it is a battle fundamentally between different views of islam and how that should be implemented in a societal setting. The battle being between the hard liners who want an authoritarian theocracy and those who want a more secular approach, with greater religious freedoms. And this battle can be traced back at least to the Iranian revolution, further through the taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, through Al Quaeda and now IS. All these being groups on one side of that battle within islam.
The west are really, in my opinion, peripheral to that battle but become involved on the basis that they are likely (certainly now) to side with the more moderate view and are therefore threatening to the extremists and damage the likelihood of their being successful.
I think IS fundamentally want the west to but out of the middle east so they can win their ideological battle with the other view of islam - effectively for the west not to be involved in a kind of idealogical civil war so to speak. I don't think IS realistically think that turning the UK (or Belgium) into an islamic state along their lines of thinking is really realistic. They do think that turning large tracts of the middle east into their kind of islamic state is, and they see the west as getting in the way of their goals.
