47blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim socie-
ties. After all, how would we feel if outside powers
and their mapmakers had divided our lands and
stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want
what everyone else wants out of life. They want
economic and po liti cal security. They want good
schools for their kids. They want to be free to
fl ourish in ways that would be fully compatible
with a global civil society. Liberals imagine that ji-
hadists and Islamists are acting as anyone else
would given a similar history of unhappy encoun-
ters with the West. And they totally discount the
role that religious beliefs play in inspiring a group
like the Islamic State—to the point where it would
be impossible for a jihadist to prove that he was
doing anything for religious reasons.
Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated
person with economic opportunities to devote
himself to the most extreme and austere version of
Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing
so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess
his certainty about martyrdom on video before
blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstra-
tions of religious fanat i cism are somehow consid-
ered rhetorically insuffi cient to prove that he really
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