“In one sense, however, there is a need to return to basics in looking at the Islamic extremist terrorist threat,” writes Jonathan A. Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League:

That involves avoiding a tendency, which corrupts the effort to address terrorism, to differentiate between the attacks, to attribute some to “root causes.”

. . . The mistake, however, is to attribute the motives of terrorism to these problems rather than seeing them as rationalizations.

In fact, the common theme of Islamic terror — whether it targets France or America or Israel, whether it targets Christians, Jews or Muslims — is a goal to destroy those who represent a desire to lead a different kind of life simply because they want to live their own lives.

Sometimes the terrorists express their destructive motives in nasty words about Christians or Jews or Shiite Islam or Sunni Islam or the modern world. Sometimes they attribute their actions to specific events, like the French presence in Syria or the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. But their common and real theme is the notion that those who are not like them must die.

Read the article “Don’t Excuse Terrorism by Talking About ‘Root Causes’” on forward.com.