blip : Beyond Lost Intellectual Ponderings :

Sojourners has a good op-ed piece on the roots of the recent bombings in London which navigates a middle ground between the liberal explanation (that it’s due to social forces, such as poverty) and the conservative explanation (that Islam is an inherently violent religion) with this explanation:

I suggest that the misguided young men responsible for the London bombings were motivated not by cultural or economic alienation (not only were they were not poor, but the world’s poor don’t tend to do such things), nor by “hatred of the West” (there are many non-Muslims who hate liberal institutions and values but don’t kill innocent civilians), nor by the study of the Quran per se (millions of Muslims who study the Quran diligently do not become suicide bombers), but rather by the simple and ancient motivation of revenge in “shame cultures” – not for evils committed against them or their families, but against what they had been indoctrinated (probably in Pakistan) into seeing as evils committed against the Ummah, or household of Islam, by the United States and Britain. These are honor killings, and have no military objectives.