Karl Marx. Flickr/Montecruz Foto. Some rights reserved
The government is, apparently, concerned about radicalisation. David Cameron told the Globsec conference in Slovakia that the Islamist narrative about the evils of the west is given too much credence. “[It] paves the way” he said, “for young people to turn simmering prejudice into murderous intent. To go from listening to firebrand preachers online to boarding a plane to Istanbul and travelling onward to join the jihadis.”
George Packer, writing in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre last January, put forth a similar argument. He was adamant that the murder of twelve people in the heart of France was not the result of France’s foreign policy, it had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq, and it certainly was not connected to Islamophobia. It was, he wrote, “only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades.”
