Tragically, the attempt to defuse the situation by disassociating terrorists from their cultural background has the perverse effect of encouraging the radicalisation of young people looking for a cause. Repelled by officialdom’s moral equivocation, some young people find that at least the jihadists do not avoid the existential questions facing their community. Linked to below is a useful spiked article by Frank Furedi, considering Islam and Islamism in light of last weeks events. (Slavoj Žižeks New Statesman article on this subject at bit.ly/1y1D4nY also contains some useful observations, but these are mixed with less-than-useful exhortations - for example, Žižek claims that liberalism needs the brotherly help of the radical Left, which I suspect is the last thing liberalism needs.)
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 20:44:39 +0000