„[T]the notion that people both in the Middle East and in the West get radicalised in response to Western interventions in the Muslim world is nonsense. This claim is nothing more than a rhetorical pillar for the grievance and victimhood ‚theology‘ of jihadism. Its purpose is to give colour to their Manichean black and white, Us vs Them worldview which sustains the most horrific excesses of the terrorists as ‚necessary‘ in their millenarian battle of ‚good‘ vs ‚evil‘: ‚They are attacking Us! We are merely defending ourselves! We are the good guys here!‘ Obviously, they must teach young children to kill with callousness and gratuitous brutality in self-defence. …
Isil and its jihadist ideology uniquely exploit and amplify these underlying conflicts [in the Muslim world] and offer the conspiracy theory solution: none of this is your fault. There is a big villain far away who has engineered all your problems. You are good people, and all of this will be magically fixed if we go now and kill the bad people. Who are the bad people? Don’t worry about it, we’ll show you when we get to the battlefront. In psychiatry, we call these denial and displacement respectively. In the real world, we have to call this the instrumentalisation of religion for an ideology of death – and a real tragedy.“ (Der Mitarbeiter am Royal Anthropological Institute der Universität Oxford Azeem Ibrahim auf der Website der britischen Tageszeitung The Daily Telegraph: „Anyone who thinks Westerners are flocking to Isil because of the Iraq war is a fantasist“)