Absent root

Here's another chapter in the very selective exercise of identifying root causes. Karen Armstrong warns against shifting the blame for terrorist atrocities on to a beleaguered Muslim community and thereby 'further alienat[ing] the disaffected'. Fair enough. Blame belongs to those responsible for these crimes and to anyone else who can be shown to be materially implicated - not diffusely to whole communities. However, note how Armstrong not merely reports but endorses the following schedule of grievances:

[T]he chief problem for most Muslims is not "the west" per se, but the suffering of Muslims in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Palestine. Many Britons share this dismay, but the strong emphasis placed by Islam upon justice and community solidarity makes this a religious issue for Muslims. When they see their brothers and sisters systematically oppressed and humiliated...[etc]

Armstrong and the other Britons she speaks of as sharing the dismay for which 'the west' is responsible appear only to recognize Abu Ghraib as a place of Western crimes, when any educated person knows it was a place of horror and infamy long before those Western crimes were committed; and their dismay over the suffering of Muslims in Iraq, linked likewise to 'the west', seems not to accommodate the sufferings of Muslims in that country caused, daily, by other Muslims there. It's that most indulgent form of 'understanding' again, seeing oppression and humiliation of Muslims except when it doesn't care to.

Update at 11.15 PM: See also the two posts on this by Ophelia at B&W.