Wahabi, Salafi, who are these people and what do they want? To what do they aspire? It's all very well to say that the USA, by its past actions has bred and encouraged the antipathy of Islam as a whole, not to mention these radical sects of Islam, by aggressive policies against them. And that may very well be true - witness our meddling in Iranian affairs fifty years ago. European culture has done much to subjugate Middle Eastern culture during the course of the last century. But it does not fully explain the phenomena we are witnessing now -- the pathological hatred of all things modern or Western, and the murderous antipathy of the Shia and Sunni sects of Islam, one against the other.
We know so little of these people. In the USA their concerns are not our concerns, our beliefs are not their beliefs -- yet we have thousands of our soldiers stationed throughout their homeland.
Why?
I consider the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld school of foreign relations to be radically extremist. And Romney too, of course. When a radical salafist labels them as the devil incarnate, I figure the salafist is not too far off the mark.
But to what extent I wonder, are the radical beliefs and actions of Salafists a reaction to Western imperialism, and to what extent are they intrinsic to the religion itself? Again, we know so little.
Are Islamic fundamentalists reacting against the encroachment of modernism itself? Do they hate cell phones as much as they hate the Shia? Why is it that throughout the Middle East, suicide bombings of innocent civilians seem to be considered a legitimate tactic of extremist Muslims? To a minor extent, that tactic has been imported from there to here, but it is not nearly so commonplace.
Can we really understand these people, and should we even try to? If we wish to understand the motivations of radical Islam, we will need to dig very deeply into our own beliefs and preconceptions about power, faith, and tradition. We will need to universalize them.