Jeremy Corbin was elected as party leader by an overwhelming majority of his party members; despite this, he has been treated as an outsider by the British political elite and the mainstream media which are trying their darnedest to cast him in a poor light. None more so than some members of his own party.
Why is this so? Perhaps because Corbyn had said something that should be common sense by now to most of our readers. From FT :
The west had “created a situation” that had contributed to the terrorist attacks on Paris
The Labour leader said that the “immediate fault” for the killings in France lay with those who committed the crimes but said that “we need to think about” the origins and support for Isis, telling the BBC that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the west had all played a role in the group’s rise.
More recently, he has had to sack one of his party members for asking, in remarks to David Cameron in the Commons on Tuesday:
“May I ask the prime minister to reject the view that sees terrorist acts as always being a response or a reaction to what we in the west do? Does he agree that such an approach risks infantilising the terrorists and treating them like children, when the truth is that they are adults who are entirely responsible for what they do?”
The remark was a clear criticism of Corbyn, one that ignored his point that while the terrorist bombing of Western civilians is horrendous, so too is the Western government-sanctioned bombing of civilians and supplying of said terror groups. 
When one is mourning the loss of a loved one to terror, this sort of one-sided rhetoric might sound plausible- a salve for a wounded nation that gives its government carte blanche to do anything at all in Syria, one that backward-rationalizes the Western-backed destruction of Iraq and Libya. But inherent within the argument is a disclaiming of the Western government’s own free agency to wrought harm on foreign countries.
Surely if one were to treat terrorists like adults, one must also extend the same argument to one’s own politicians as well.
Indeed, The Intercept notes that a 2004 defense task force report (which was commissioned by the Pentagon, while it was headed by Donald Rumsfeld) would decisively conclude (or more accurately, be forced to admit) that Muslim attacks against the West are a direct consequence of Western coalition policies and strikes against Muslims:
American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies.
• Muslims do not “hate our freedom,” but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.
• Thus when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy…
• Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim self determination.
• Therefore, the dramatic narrative since 9/11 has essentially borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars. American actions and the flow of events have elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims...
Drone bombings have been the hallmark of Obama’s presidency- at least 8 weddings have been struck between 2001 and 2013, among other under-reported “Bataclans” that occur every day as a result of the Predator Drone’s “inaccuracy”; nearly 90% of drone victims were not the intended target.
Failed suicide bomber Faisal Shahzad would explain to his sentencing judge his reasons for attempting to blow up Time Square: “the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody”. Simply because a person uses himself as a means to deliver a bomb, rather than a drone, does not somehow make the consequences any worse- innocents were killed either way. Then there’s the proven cases of torture and detention without trial at Black Sites like Guantanamo…
The British intelligence, US General David Petraeus and former British PM Tony Blair’s deputy John Prescott have all acknowledged that radical Islam has roots in Western policies.
This is not to say that Islamic extremists are solely antagonized by Western policy; many are crazed lunatics who were brainwashed by radical texts, and needed any reason at all to justify their attacks against helpless civilians in the West- their actions against moderate Muslims and Christians in Syria under the guise of ISIS has proven that to be the case.
However, the fact remains that Western policy did put many individuals on the path towards extremism (this was literally the case when the US sent extremist texts to Afghan school children) and provide the already-radicalized with a plausible reason to strike; one expects a man who is being beaten to hit back, just as the US government did after September 11th (albeit in Iraq, which was completely uncalled for).
It will be a reversal of such policy, perhaps by holding its own leaders accountable for actions in Iraq and Libya, that will provide lasting peace and take away the extremist’s best recruiting tool- and not more drone bombings/ destabilizing of governments/ supporting of “moderate” extremists/ demonizing of people who believe that Western governments consist of adults who have free agency.
Sources: The Intercept , Financial Times, VICE, The Nation, The Guardian
This Article (What Really Causes Terrorism Against The West?) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author(CoNN) and AnonHQ.com.
