harlowdrae

Algeria and Palestine/Israel were the most prominent locales of politically motivated violence against civilians in the Middle East until relatively recently. This is linked to their histories as the sites of the most extensive European colonial settlement in the region. Despite the significant role of Islam in mobilizing resistance to European settlement in both cases, the argument that this resulted from a general Islamic propensity for violence has emerged only recently. That contention is a product of postcolonial anxieties about U.S. global supremacy and the regional dominance of the U.S.-Israeli alliance in the Middle East.

—

Joel Beinin, Is Terrorism a Useful Term in Understanding the Middle East and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict? (2003)

In the last 24 hours it seems as if my dashboard and those in my message box have forgotten this. Good thing I’m right in the middle of doing all this research about terrorism. How many scholars need to reiterate this point before people start holding it as true? I have about 94 scholarly works that all say the same thing.

Don’t feed into the pseudo-leftist Bill Maher way of thinking about Islam. The Eastern religion of Islam isn’t the problem. It’s Western colonialism and imperialism.

(via mohandasgandhi)