But I think his assessment, below is unduly pessimistic:
"deep anti-Western sentiment among young Arab Muslims that, in the many cases I've seen and read about, goes against what most (if not all) people on this list subscribe to -- secular culture. The right to be obscene. Drugs. Booze. Porn. The lot."
My recollection of some Pew research not so long ago was that Arab muslims were generally in admiration of many aspects of western society, of its technology and consumer goods and even of its liberalism and democracy, but were profoundly critical of its foreign policy especially its pro-Israel stance and its bullying imperialism.
There are of course some 'anti-Western' cultural conservatives who frame their anti-modernism in Islamic terms, but these are mostly isolated, and would have no influence at all but for the disruption to civil society that US-UK foreign policy has.
But it is surely worth noting that the ideology of the Islamists is just as much imitated from the west as is the pro-consumerist, pro-technology thinking. In fact it is a mish-mash of conservative and anti-consumerist ideas that are commonplace in the West.
Understanding their motivation is the easy part. How to deal with and curtail the wider madness unleashed and stoked by the US, of which these bombings are a part, is much tougher. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20050727/4dc4ee94/attachment.htm>