Well it does doesn't it - those places are seen as 'The West'.
"The West" is responsible for millions of deaths in the Middle East. To pretend that they aren't is ridiculous. If it happened here, then the suggestion that it wouldn't create anger and disgust is equally ridiculous.
Andy, there's nuanced piece in
Grauniad by Freedland.
It's worth a read to understand where I'm coming from with my request that it would be a good idea to think very carefully before making what superficially appears to be an attractive solution, but may well turn out to be a far too simplistic approach.
....One camp holds that the men who plant these bombs are driven by loathing for western values, for our freedom and permissive way of life, and especially for the liberty exercised by women. The other argues that the root cause is western foreign policy and our record of armed intervention in Muslim lands. Boiled down, it becomes a battle of who we are versus what we do.
I understand the draw of the latter position, which was staked out in a sober and carefully caveated speech by Jeremy Corbyn today. For one thing, foreign policy clearly plays some role in these horrific events. Listen to the testimony of Jomana Abedi, sister of the Manchester murderer, who said of her brother: “He saw the explosives America drops on children in Syria, and he wanted revenge,” before adding, rather chillingly: “Whether he got that is between him and God.” Recall the posthumous video released by Mohammad Sidique Khan, ringleader of the 7/7 bombers, in which he cast himself as an avenger for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And recall too the warnings of Britain’s security services, who feared the Iraq war could lead to increased radicalisation.
Besides, such a stance has an appeal beyond the facts. It grants us a degree of control over these acts of catastrophe. It lets us think that we can bring an end to this horror, if only we change tack internationally. We can ensure there are no Manchester tragedies: it’s up to us.
The trouble is, the link is not nearly so simple or direct. Talk to those who devote their lives to the study of violent jihadism, reading Isis’s propaganda and interviewing its devotees, and a different picture emerges.
For one thing, it’s not all about us. Most of jihadism’s victims are other Muslims, in the Arab world or in Africa. When they murder and maim Shia Muslims by the hundreds, they’re not doing that to punish western foreign policy. When Isis set about the massacre of Yazidi men and the enslavement and mass rape of Yazidi women and girls, it wasn’t revenge for western meddling in the Middle East. It takes an oddly Eurocentric view of the world to decide that this is a phenomenon entirely of the west’s creation.
Moreover, what might count as western provocation, fuelling jihadism, is not as clear as some might like to think. Many on the left assume it is military intervention that turns young men into jihadis ready to murder pre-teen girls. But I recall my own first encounter with that ideology, back in the 1990s.
I was speaking at a student meeting that was disrupted by loud activists from the extremist al-Muhajiroun group. What were they furious about? The west’s failure to take military action over Bosnia. These young men were livid that Britain and the US had not dropped bombs to prevent the massacre at Srebrenica. It proved, they said, that the west held Muslim lives to be cheap.
We know that Salman Abedi was a child of Libyan Islamists, vehemently opposed to Muammar Gaddafi. Imagine his rage if the west had heard the dictator’s threats to carry out a massacre in Bengazi in 2011 and done nothing. It would be similar to the jihadi venom that’s directed at the west for failing to stop Bashar al-Assad from slaughtering Muslims in Syria – a sentiment that helped win recruits to Islamic State.
The point is, this is an ideology that can rage against western inaction as much as action. When I spoke to Shiraz Maher, a senior research fellow at King’s College London who studies radicalisation up close, he put the problem concisely: “You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”
Maher suggests that western foreign policy often plays the role of a hook on which jihadis can hang a much larger set of ideological, and theological, motives. In his latest essay for the New Statesman, he quotes one British Isis recruit he interviewed, who told him: “We primarily fight wars due to people being disbelievers. Their drones against us are a secondary issue.”
So it’s not clear what a foreign policy designed to soothe rather than inflame jihadi opinion would look like – or that it would get you very far. Staying out of Muslim countries might seem like the obvious answer, but it offers no guarantees. Not against those who can regard an eight-year-old girl and her friends as “crusaders”, worthy of death for the sin of dancing in a “shameless concert arena”.
Maybe it would be easier to bear if our fate was entirely in our hands, if a life of peace and calm beckoned if only we chose the right path. It would be a comfort, but a false one – for it would misunderstand the enemy we face.And as I said to someone else yesterday, ok, so we change our foreign policy to whatever. What will then be the excuse should any further outrage occur?
Maybe, just maybe, it's a lot more complex than we would like to think and the solution is not as simple as a change in foreign policy to some yet unspecified way.
And I'm still waiting an answer from someone else who when I challenged them and said what exactly is it we should we change, seemed bereft of ideas other than that we should change it.
So, do we adopt a totally non-interventionist policy?
Do we only intervene when the UN has a majority for intervention?
Do we intervene if it's a Nato member that's attacked?
What if we are no longer a member of Nato which some on the Far left would like?
If we do adopt a non-Intervention policy, what does that mean for the armed forces as there's a simplistic financial attraction in huge cutbacks to them (and several well documented references to such plans over the years by the radical Left) in order to redirect funding elsewhere, but often this is without considering the impact on high tech industries and skills as well as balance of payments to the UK.
And if for example we cosy up to the Iranians (Shia), how will that effect our relations with Sunni countries?
Now I'm all for a formal re-examination of our Foreign policy, it's clear in retrospect that mistakes have been made, and perhaps then lessons could be learned and new procedures adopted.
But I do believe that in our exasperation and anger at these outrages, we should be very careful of jumping to alarmingly simplistic solutions only to find ourselves later on down the road, helpless in the face of naked aggression from utter bastards who hate us no matter what we do and that want to bring us harm by any means at their disposal.
