I think it is important to consider, though, the effects that orientalism and western racism has had on the Middle East... Extremism in the Middle East didn’t exist before colonialism and is a result of very low employment rates for young men especially, which leaves them open as targets for wahhabists and other exploitative militant groups. Fatima Mernissi is a wonderful Moroccan feminist and sociologist who was really troubled in the 1990s by the rise of extremism in The Middle East and she really looked into the roots of extremism and it turns out all this is connected on a deep level—that people with no opportunities for personal security and consistent employment tend to be super easy to manipulate. Physical attacks on Hebdo employees were incredibly fucked up, cruel, myopic and close-minded (horrific, absolutely). I also remember after the attack seeing the juxtaposition between 1) people saying ‘je suis Charlie and 2) images emerging of their VERY racist cover pages, like the one about Nigeria. I know intellectually that when people I know said ‘je suis charlie’ they meant ‘I believe in free speech and this violence is unacceptable and I will not stand for it’ but it came off, at times, like they were endorsing drawing black Nigerians like monkeys, for example, especially given the history of orientalism within our culture and the way people’s lives have been limited increasingly due to global urbanization and decreasing access to meaningful work in cultures that have been really bulldozed by our drive to milk them for oil

TL;DR: the way to suppress fundamentalism in the region has everything to do with funding education, jobs programs, and giving people access to a purpose in life, and making sure all of these young men have a way to change their situations, (and if they can’t, opportunities to learn about economics and why they might be struggling). We’ve seen it all over now—people who are not given access to basic survival are easily manipulated by people with truly evil intentions