[Undertoad]

http://newsisyphus.blogspot.com/2005...wi-speaks.html

Experts on Islamic Terrorism--from former high USG officials like Richard "Bush is Personally Responsible for 9/11" Clarke to pundits like Thomas Friedman of the NY Times--are roughly divided in half between two schools of thought on Islamic Terrorism. The first group, the "Muslim Rage School," believes that the source of Islamic Terrorism is the wide-spread anger in the Muslim world directed at the West and at Israel. For partisans of this school, US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians, US support for despotic Middle Eastern regimes, Western economic outperformance of the Muslim world and anger towards US responses to the 9/11 Attacks, all add up to one thing: a seething mass of justifiable rage that presents itself, though a minority of those affected, as radical Islamic Terrorism.

The Muslim Rage School has attracted theorists as ideologically opposed as Edward Said and Bernard Lewis, and is by far and away the dominant school of thought among experts on the topic. (This school is well on display in this month's issue of The Atlantic, a fact which we will delve into in much greater depth this weekend, circumstances and consular emergencies permitting). As a rule, this school's policy preference for defeating Islamic Terrorism is to reduce the generators of the anger. Thus, the US must bring and end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, atone for past actions against the Muslim world, and generally radically change its long-standing foreign policy towards the Middle East. Only then will there be peace.

The second school of thought, the Clash of Civilizations School, argues that the source of Islamic Terrorism is the Muslim world's seething hatred of the fundamental values of the West, and, since the U.S. is the standard-bearer for the West at the moment, especially those of the United States. Adherents of this school, like Victor Hanson and most neo-conservative thinkers, argue that the value system of modern Islam produces a culture that is violently at odds with Western values and, because of this, it wages asymmetric war against the West when and where it can.