I am now more inclined to think of Islam’s problems in the context of political tensions, economic malaise and social strife rather than more intrinsic, fundamental ills. I have yet to hear @SamHarris refute the point that the most recent invasion of and subsequent occupation of Iraq was, in large part, a Christian crusade led by evangelical zealots like George W Bush, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld and Cheney and involving war-profiteering, Christian fundamentalist militants like Erik Prince, who openly believes his purpose is to wage a crusade. This undertaking in Mesopotamia has killed more innocent people than all conventionally-defined acts of terror in the last century.

While I routinely reject the false equivalency between WBC or KKK and ISIL, al shabbab and al qaeda on the grounds that you couldn’t fill center court at Wimbledon with the number of Christians who would have you killed for working on Sunday, depicting Jesus or leaving the faith, the notion that Islam is the sole religion of today responsible for promulgating violence is demonstrably false.

The difference, it seems to me, is branding: ISIL nominally exists to create a caliphate through the religiously emotive “jihad”, while western democracies are theoretically secular. Conversely, the name “Operation Iraqi Freedom” belies various insidious ulterior motives, all of which supersede the spreading of democracy as plausible motivations for the war. A thinly-veiled crusade foremost among them.

I don’t subscribe to the school of thought that thousands of armed militants plot to disrupt our way of life because that lifestyle itself offends them. I believe it’s got a lot more to do with the belligerent presence of western forces in many, occasionally sacred territories of the Islamic world. War is visited upon their shores with a grim regularity that numbs us all to their pain.

Sure, London is a generally peaceful place home to many carefree rascals like this happy chappie, but the distant realities of the desperate, destitute people ravaged by decades of western-engineered conflict don’t permit such blithe nonchalance.

The government that represents Mr. Six-gin-and-tonics-after-work-on-a-Tuesday is partly responsible for or at least tacitly complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians and others east of the Nile.

They don’t hate us for our freedom. They hate us for interfering with theirs.

http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/news/a15299/eye-witness-from-london-terror-attack-goes-viral-with-defiant-news-interview/