Creating the enemy
How a risk-averse West has inflamed the terrorism it fears.
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In March 2004, following the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 civilians, I wrote an essay for spiked in which I argued that contemporary nihilistic terrorism has its origins in moral and political crises within the West, not in the hotheaded fanaticism of faraway lands. I argued that, if you strip away all the talk about a ‘clash of civilisations’, the real problem of terrorism – in terms of both its origins and the massive impact that such small-scale and disparate acts can have on our so
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