'The kingdom's bastard child'

I understand that this might not be the most popular to thing to say right now but it's interesting that no-one has much to say about how the Saudis have funded the growth of fanaticism in so many places over the last forty years (with the recent help of the Qataris) and how they seem to be the allies, good friends, of 'the west'. As the Yanks love to say: "Go figure!"

Adam Shatz, writing in the LRB, raises a number of interesting issues:

"What most of the jihadis appear to have in common is a lack of any serious religious training: according to most studies, there is an inverse relationship between Muslim piety and attraction to jihad. As Olivier Roy, the author of several books on political Islam, recently said, ‘this is not so much the radicalisation of Islam as the Islamicisation of radicalism...

Exploiting Saudi anger over Obama’s pursuit of a rapprochement with Tehran, France has aligned itself with the Saudis on Iran’s nuclear programme and on Syria, and is now competing with the US to become Saudi Arabia’s top supplier of advanced military technology...

All the movements we’ve known, from the Vietcong to the FLN to the Palestinians, had demands: if the occupation ends, if we get independence, the war ends. But Daesh’s project is to eliminate the frontiers of Sykes-Picot. It’s like the Biblical revisionism of the settlers, who invent a history that never existed."

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It goes without saying that this is a nihilistic outfit and that it is probably drawing sexually frustrated young men to it. Paris, the centre of prostitution and vice (really, might want to take a trip to Dubai or the kingdom). I don't think one can or should ignore the horrific sex slavery that is involved here. Not just because of the absolute despicable nature of it, but also as a way of partly understanding what's going on.

Right-wingers are keen to connect this to immigration, refugees, to Islam, to the Palestinians (yes, there is sickness everywhere)..anything but the involvement of their "own" governments in helping create the swamp in the first place. This is not about "blame" but about trying to understand.

On the other hand many Muslims are, in your opinion, failing to look at their own political and moral failings. Is the drift to conservatism, the growing prevalence of conspiracy theories, of anti-semitism and anti-western attitudes, leading to a kind of mass delusion which, coupled with more specific factors such as alienation, urbanization and rising inequality that affect specific groups, making the emergence of extremism all the more likely?

It's a bit glib to paraphrase Keynes here but: 'good states of mind depend on things working'. When nothing is working, what fills the vacuum?