titusonenine — Kenan Malik–Multiculturalism has fanned the flames of Islamic extremism: “ONE was a loving father. Another helped out in his parents’ fish and chip shop. All apparently chatted away as if they were going on holiday as they walked through King’s Cross station with their deadly rucksacks. It is the contrast between the ordinariness of the London bombers’ lives and the savage barbarism of their actions that is so shocking. ”

This remidns me of a book I read–basically the published congressional report that was released after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. The title was something like “Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?” and it indeicated that the old liberal mantra that terrorism is the child of oppression and scarcity is false–at least in the first instance–it may serve as a motivation or a sort of martyrology but not the manner many argue. This isn’t surprising given the origins of modern Islamism in the writings of Sayid Qtub, a man who interpreted Islam politically through a lens of reaction against the western political philosophies of Communism and Liberalism.