Another explanation of Islamic terror which leaves out Islam

This time brought to us through the pages of the IHT. Graham Bowley lists the usual reasons for what turned such nice, promising young men into murderous terrorists in London: social isolation, economic hardship, failure by the authorities to ensure British values were properly inculcated in the immigrants:

According to Jennifer Jackson Preece, a lecturer in nationalism at the London School of Economics, traditional analysis yields three main explanations why some immigrants fail to integrate in their adopted countries.

One is social. Some immigrants choose, or are forced, to live in ghettos apart from mainstream society and therefore never fully adopt that society's values.

A second reason is economic. Some immigrants do not have rewarding jobs and therefore do not embrace the same values they would if they shared in the common prosperity.

A third reason, she says, is a failure by domestic political elites, like the police or schools, to impress the home country's values on newcomers. [...]

Right. These are all factors that play a role in producing criminals and social misfits. But what is missing from Bowley's list is radical Islam. It seems that the other factors are to blame for allowing the men to fall under the spell of Islamo-fascism.

Talk about blaming the victim. Rather than pointing out that the fault lies with this murderous doctrine, and condemning those that allow it to flourish in their neighborhoods, Bowley is content to blame society.

Even after describing the different paths taken by two terrorists and that of the Brazilian man tragically killed by the police, Bowley doesn't note that a main difference was religion:

Yasin Hassan Omar came to Britain from Somalia in 1992 when he was 11 years old. Thirteen years later, on July 21, he tried to detonate a bomb on the London Underground, the police suspect.

Muktar Said Ibrahim came to Britain from Eritrea in 1992. Last month he allegedly attempted to blow up a London bus. A week ago, he was arrested, stripped partially naked on the orders of armed police, on the balcony of a low-income flat in the west of the capital.

Both are suspected of taking the road from young immigrant to suicidal bomber. But what were the steps in their personal stories? [...]

Another immigrant, one caught up in the recent dramas, was Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian who came to Britain in 2002.

He had a good job in London as an electrician. He had close family ties: He lived with two cousins, Vivian and Patricia, and sent money home to his parents in Brazil.

He embraced everything about his new life in London, his friends said at a vigil for him last week. He went to church every Sunday, but he never became a fanatic. ...

Perhaps because there was no murderous strain of fanaticism in his religion.

Some or all of these reasons may explain why young immigrant males turn to Islam - and some to a particularly extreme and strict strain of Islam.

It is a strain without the cultural baggage of their parents' faith and one that has fed on the perceived injuries to their religion inflicted over the past 10 to 15 years by events like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but also the deaths of Muslims in the first Gulf war, the Bosnian conflicts and the wars in Chechnya.

For the generation of the bombers who came to maturity over the past 15 years, the international backdrop, says Abbas, has been one long onslaught against Islam.

"They see the imagery and graphic pictures of war zones and hear views that paint the whole of a people as an enemy," Tahir Alam of the Muslim Council of Britain said. "They arrive at a position where they feel morally or ethically ignored, and try to kill themselves and innocent people."

Previous waves of immigrants, like the Irish and Italians in New York, as well as the vast majority of current immigrants into Britain, like de Menezes, have faced similar problems but never resorted to suicidal terrorism.

What could possibly be different, and therefore the real problem? I'll put my money on radical Islam.

Instead, Jackson Preece of the London School of Economics says, the forces that pushed the bombers to the shadowy extremes of society are likely to be the same that push members of any other community to the fringes, like failure at school or family breakdown. [...]

True, but it wasn't the fringes that turned those men into terrorists. Some still don't accept that the common theme isn't a failure of society at large, but of the Muslim communities which tolerate fanaticism in their midst.