If this is an attempt to explain why young men resorted to terrorism in the attacks against Britain, Madrid, the United States and Bali, it is laughably inadequate and has more holes in it than a golf course. A brief examination of the life of Mohamed Atta or Ziad al-Jarrah would be enough to dispel this fog.

No I don’t. I keep asking questions about your reasoning, none of which you have so far seen fit to answer, whereas I have quoted you at length.

But the point is that none of the states or regions I have mentioned have someone like the Saudis and other oil-rich sheikhs spreadiing their poisonous antisemitic and anti-Western propaganda in networks of mosques and other communications media around the world.

And your contention is what? That this is caused by them being Arabs? That it is caused by their attachment to the clan system? What?

Neither have an extremist ideology committed to overthrowing the world system.

Do the Saudis have this? I can’t say I had noticed. Once again, I would point out the Pearl movie is set in Pakistan, formerly part of British India. It was in India under British rule that the Khilafat movement and the Deobandi school of Islam first emerged. It was in India under British rule that Abu al-Ala Maududi declared jihad to be “the sixth pillar of Islam” and founded Jamaat-i-Islami. Were all these people secretly Arabs?

The point is that the general feeling in the West is that the majority of the Arab world has at least some sympathy for the extremism and terrorism that we see coming out of that part of the world.

My point is that “general feeling” is not a sound basis for conclusions about what is going on in the Arab world. Can you find a survey of public opinion in the Arab world that bears this view out? The way that people in the Arab world view “extremism” is certainly different from the way people not in the Arab world view it. As I have said already, this is to do with ongoing political realities, not inchoate rage or self-pity.

It was Arab/Muslim extremists that carried out 9/11 and Muslim extremists that did the 7/7 attacks in London.

And the conclusions you draw from this are what? That there is something particularly screwed up about Arabs? Your second example doesn’t involve Arabs. It involves young British men of South Asian descent who attended training camps in … Pakistan.

Are you starting to see my point?

Please don’t try to generalise about the Arab world using Gaddafi as an example.

http://www.eicds.org/english/publications/reports/Annual-Report-EN07.pdf

I would recommend pages 23-25. The whole thing is 218 pages, and I shall be very interested to see how much of it is about clan systems in Arab countries.

Same in Iraq….the election merely exacerbated existing religious and clan tensions that were repressed in Saddam’s period, but existing just under the surface.

Yes, I noted the same problem with imjudy’s comment about Algeria. But there’s a similar problem here. It was not the Iraqi elections that exacerbated inter-religious tensions in Iraq. They were already superheated by the botched American occupation of Iraq which did nothing to alleviate such tensions in the immediate aftermath of the toppling of Saddam. We had ample opportunity to attempt to work with Iraqis of the old regime who might’ve provided some continuity in the new one. Instead, we swept all the Baathists and the former Iraqi army officers out & attempted to start fr. scratch w/o knowing where to turn or what we were doing.

The war was not the outcome of elections. It was the outcome of the cancellation of elections by the military. And did France take the side of the voters or the military? I can only assume the former, given the “inherent” commitment of French society to democratic norms. Alors! Ce n’est pas comme ca? Quel dommage.

I assume imjudy is talking about this:

http://www.eicds.org/english/publications/saadarticles/2005/despotism.htm

And we can see almost immediately that Dr Ibrahim does not dismiss the Islamists as a valid source of democratic discourses.

Algeria had a truly free multy-party election in 1990 and what was the result?…a bloody civil war.

This is a bowdlerising of the historical record. What caused the war was the refusal of the state apparatus to relinquish power to the democratically elected legislature, not the fact of elections themselves. As for talk of clan tensions in Iraq, I’d like an example.

As I pointed out, Africa has a lot more reason . . . and their political and religious leaders don’t go around encouraging violence and suicide bombings against whites, or Europeans or Americans because of the injustices they suffered in the past.

“In the past” would seem to be the key words here. Can you name an African country where the injustice is 1) ongoing and 2) clearly supported by American money?

India, which was under British colonial rule for centuries and which suffered from traditional values and attitudes such as the caste system (similar to the clan loyalties of the Arab world) and governmental corruption, still managed to create a functioning democracy.

But the caste system still exists, as does voting according to clan allegiance and rampant corruption! The idea that democracy involves a turning away from all these things is given the lie precisely by the Indian experience. India also has plenty of terrorism.

Please explain to me why not one of 20+ Arab states, which were under European colonial rule for a maximum of a few decades can’t seem to do this.

Well clearly it isn’t to do with “societal inertia”. India has plenty of that too.

Yes, I know that they were under Ottoman rule for a long time, but the Ottoman homeland, Turkey, today is an Islamic democracy.

This is made to sound like a fabulous fait accompli. Yet Turkey has also in the 80-odd years of the republic experienced rule by the military, frightful persecution of minorities, torture, persecution of leftists and Islamists. The democracy is not as secure as this rather trite statement would suggest. Only recently the chief of staff of the armed forces felt he was within his rights to interfere in the appointment of the president. And Turkey does not consider itself “an Islamic democracy”.

How the pattern that imjudy describes - of quasi-democratic institutions under European tutelage being replaced by nationalist command regimes in the immediate post-colonial period - is different from the African or Latin American experience I don’t know. To say that functioning democracies haven’t emerged is quite different from saying that something inherent in Arabs prevents them from doing so. I presume that Lebanon isn’t a functioning democracy by imjudy’s definition - and the main obstacle to this is a system of communal representation devised by … Europeans.