@blatham,
blatham wrote:
The fanaticism we see now directed against the west has historical causes. It cannot be attributed to a simple thesis of "The Muslim faith is through and through a violent philosophy and so violence that we see is inevitable". But if we conceive of it that way, speak of it that way, and treat it that way, we're absolutely certain to create more of what we wish to see minimized.
Though you write with the air of authority, you have the sequence of events backwards . Significantly, I believe you are mixing up cause and effect.
You are completely ignoring the real proximate historical causes of the current Moslem resentments with the West. It's origins are with with British and Franch colonialism in India and North Africa early in the 19th century and continuing through the British swindle of stock in the Egyptian Suez Canal Company, which ended in defacto British control. This continued through British advances and exploitation in The Persian Gulf and Iran in pursuit of the vast petroleum resourses found there.
The process culminated in WWI with a direct assault on the crumbling Ottoman Empire by Britain, France and Russia at Gallipoli in the West and Armenia in the east coupled with a British inspired and financed uprising of the Arabs of Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia. The British promised independence for the Arabs under the rule of the Hashemite leaders who had just been driven out of Mecca and Medina by the upstart Ibn Saud, leading a band of fanatics from Yemen, but cynically they had already made a deal with the French dividing up the spoils between them - the French getting Syria, Lebanon and the Mosul provincce of Mesopotamia and the British all the rest. To cap it off the British separately promised the Rothschilds and a nascent Zionist movement in Europe a homeland for European Jews in Palestine, also without consulting their Arab stooges.
At war's end colonial rule in these areas was imposed, and the British installed the Shah's father Reza in Persia/Iran, thereby creating a parallel underground Islamist movement in that hue country. The Arab war with the West soon began (its Iranian equivalent arose a few decades later). The Moslem Brotherhood and other like organizartions started then along with a competing secular Bathist movement modeled on German Authoritarianisn which gave birth to the Assads and Saddam. The subsequent development of the fruits of these deceptions, including the errors of the United States in reacting to it, are pretty well known.
I realize that doesn't fit your political narritive very well, but it the truth and it is the proximate historical origin of a struggle that started before WWII and has grown in intensity and spread across the region since then.
