A part of me hopes that hesbighesred is accurate in his assessment, and there isn't someone who genuinely believes the west will convert to Islam if just 12 more trucks are plowed into a crowd of pedestrians.
It's just such an abject form of terror (and I'll gladly concede that it is again) that I find it almost tragic that anyone believes they can achieve anything this way. Unless of course the west rises to the bait and irrationally turns on its Muslim minorities in response to these attacks.
I think the aim behind the attacks is what the perpetrators see as pay back or revenge. Most join Isis in the warped idea of defending their "brothers and sisters" , the biggest recruiting tool for Isis isn't telling the impressionable ones let's take over the world and make it Islamic, its that your brothers and sisters are getting slaughtered in Palestine, Iraq , Syria,and other places, and if you are a true Muslim, your duty is to defend by going on the attack. Pipe dreams don't work as recruitment literature, they give them something that they feel they can back up with evidence.
We will never tackle the problem if we just take on the idea that we are good and they are evil and they want to suppress us. They feel exactly the same way, suppressed, oppressed, the west wants to ethnically cleanse them and wipe out their religion, and they are fighting back. Its ridiculous to assume that people will readily die, just to take over the world, giving their life in a fight for survival is a more convincing tool.
Education is paramount, those who are impressionable, and there's a lot of them, given the poverty and lack of education that they grow up in, need to see the world for what it is, not some monster trying to eradicate them. Obviously mass bombings and years of killing don't help.
As for home grown terrorists, they can fuck right off, had the same opportunities as the rest of us, just too cowardly to face life.
