Mehdi Hasan’s claim (We accept Russian bombs can provoke a terrorism backlash. Our bombs can too,18 November) that it is “verboten in our public discourse” to point to a link between western policy and terrorist attacks is rather undermined by the fact that he is able to develop that claim in your pages and the many other national media outlets he writes for. Other commentators in the Guardian, the Independent, or the fresh Statesman and (indeed) the Daily Mail have frequently aired the blowback explanation for terrorism.
But if this is all that is being said,surely it is banal. I suppose there may be some rightwing cranks who assume Islamic State has grown among young Muslim people because they are bloodthirsty masochists or some such nonsense. Obviously, Isis and other Islamist terrorism organisations point to real things in the real world to build a base, and they wouldn’t have one.
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Source: theguardian.com