SWC Poll: What Motivates Islamist Terrorism against the West?

[Mark O'Neill]

Perhaps, there are a couple of problems with the questions as posed:

1. The "West" does not have cohesive unitary foreign policy. It is not a sovereign state. Just like the 'Islamic world' is not unitary or cohesive. Both are contructs that we use without thinking too much about what we really mean.

2. When we talk about 'ideology' what specifically do we mean? Islam is not Catholicism, with a centralised intepretation of dogma codified by the Vatican. There is even radical differentiation between the various strands of 'extreme' islamism? Similarly, which culture? Indonesia is vastly different to Iraq which is different to Nigeria etc etc

I have no doubt that the poll will generate plenty of opinion, a problem will be the broad interpretations by respondents of the underlying assumptions of the as questions posed.