Thomas Piketty: Clamping down with law and order will not be enough

This assertion seems obviously false. ISIS isn't suddenly "better" because they are killing in the name of something other than "Islamic extremism." There are also plenty of extreme right-wing muslims who don't kill people, which also suggests that a generic diagnosis of "islamic extremism" is not enough to explain ISIS.

If you /really/ believe ISIS is powered by a fervent belief in fundamentalist Islam and nothing else, then there are no remedies other than killing every member of the group as their rhetoric inescapably leads to the conclusion they should kill everyone who disagrees with them. Of course, to believe that, you also have to believe previous groups that espoused philosophies with similar conclusions (Al' Qaeda, etc) were lying - as we haven't kill all of their members and their terrorist & militant activities have fallen off. If all muslim extremists are driven solely by personal belief in islamic extremism, we would never expect them to change their behavior.

But people do change! All the time. So, even if you believe that all extremely right-wing muslims want to kill everyone all the time (a preposition I find hard to believe myself), you should also see that some (most I would say) muslim extremists choose not to kill most of the people most of the time. If we want to save as many lives as possible we should, while we push back against the intellectual garbage of extreme Islam, should also work to understand the factors that cause some extremists to kill and others to live in relative harmony.

Once the obvious cause (religion) has been eliminated, whatever remains, however unlikely must be the truth.

Except the obvious has only been eliminated in his analysis because of a dogmatic belief in human/religious/cultural equality (module disadvantages caused by economics and western foreign policy).

Casting the rise of ISIS as a black-and-white, good-vs.-evil struggle allows some very clever politicians to have their way: torture some folks, spy on citizens. But if we look deeper at the situation, we'll see that motivations are more complex. In doing so, however, we (the West) must confront our role in the situation.

"For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.” [0]

[0]http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-inte...

Well, to be fair, for part of the time al-Qaeda was dominant in the threat list, the group now calling itself "the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant" was calling itself "al-Qaeda in Iraq".

1) remove nationalists from power by destroying all infrastructure. They sucked, but they sucked for everybody and they weren't nearly as bad as religous muslims.

2) jobs ... gone. Money ... gone (or gone soon). Family ... partially gone. Tribe ... partially gone. Security forces replaced by US troops, who don't speak the language.

3) this situation persists for years.

4) (for Sunni's, Christians, ...) US replaces security forces (suddenly) with an army exclusively formed by a religious grouping that Sunni's are attacking wherever they can (Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Afghanistan ...) who are looking for revenge.

5) These new security forces come in, US forces don't keep them in check, then suddenly abandon everyone. This sort of stuff becomes commonplace : http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-11/shiite-mili...

6) several tens of thousands of people that this happened to were soldiers.

So why is islamic extremism spreading ? For Iraq, you have the answer above this sentence. For Europe/America the answer is different. It is not spreading within the older generation, people who fled the middle east. It is spreading within the youth. How ? Well :

1) schools, bankrolled from Saudi Arabia and Turkey teach islamic supremacism to the kids of immigrant muslims.

2) western european states do token cleanups of these schools every 10 years or so, but not fast enough to make them stop.

3) these kids are not educated to the level even bad local schools educate local youngsters. At 18, they are suddenly abandoned, and quickly find out that no job, no family (not possible without job), no car, no status symbols, ... sucks

4) furthermore. Suddenly islamic supremacism educated kids finds society (including muslims) shun them, or worse. Why ? They have no decent skills, and because of the supremacism thing they are prone to violence.

5) they subsist on welfare for a while, generally causing trouble around them and little else.

6) someone offers them a purpose. "Free" brides (ie. kidnapped women and children. Like most muslim scholars, daesh sees nothing wrong with forced marriage at 6, after all the prophet did it. Makes you wonder how "normal" muslims morally deal with that). A state and police force that supports the supremacism and a free ride over. Oh and a monthly paycheck that more or less matches local welfare checks and what you might call life insurance.

The biggest thing stopping them: daesh has a reputation for getting people killed and abandoning them.

Let's get real here : if the US did the same to a Western European country it did to Iraq, there'd be isis/daesh territory in the middle of Western Europe, no doubt.

Also let's face facts here, and scale the problem. Daesh/islam will not be recruiting really large amounts of muslims from the western world. But it is growing : these people will cause a civil war in Europe unless the situation changes.