Quote:
They don't hate everyone. Just those who they feel are responsible for allowing infidels to occupy their holy land and attack their brothers.

What drives them is their religious leaders. What drives the religious leaders is the same thing that drives all religious leaders: Power.

If only the individual terrorists truly understood what pawns they were.


I disagree with the first piece, it's not about infidels occupying holy lands as far as I understand it, more a sense of frustration at being unable to affect the west's foreign policy towards the muslim world. The rest is broadly true.

I'm not about to get drawn into an argument over why they feel this or how much truth there is in their understanding, all I'd say is that as a Londoner who lived through the long period of Christian extremist terrorism in the UK it's just something that we'll have to deal with. (That may seem casually said, but I've been close enough to IRA bombings, and the 7/7 ones were virtually on my doorstep, my brother in law spent a week down the tunnels at Aldgate searching for human remains)

To me it's angry young men being given plenty of reasons to be angry about. Are the perpetrators going to achieve anything by these acts? Well no, nothing positive anyway, but the one thing I know that it's doing is waking your average Joe Muslim to the idea that these people don't just parachute in from a different planet, it's their own sons, brothers, cousins etc, not some poor Arab or Afghan 1000s of miles away.

The UK muslim community is hurting in a big way over this and 7/7, we need to educate*** our youth, something which I think is being understood much more widely now, even by our government. Have we adequately and convincingly told the rest of the world that? I don't think so, most of the "muslim leaders" trotted out in front of the TV cameras on occasions such as these bear about as much relevance to me as Mickey Mouse, there isn't a real theocratic structure in Islam the way there is in Christianity/Judaism, it's not like the Anglican church that can have an "official" view, they're all just individuals and most are extremely poorly equipped to deal with the modern media machine.

*** I mean education in a broader sense, not in terms of qualifications, god sakes my first 2 nephews that went to Uni passed their degree courses with honours, it's about political and social justice, how to affect change within and without the society that we live in etc.