What is the answer to radical Islam? This is NOT an anti Islam thread

[ArnoldRimmer]

First of all, the impression that terrorism is mainly connected to radical islam is completely wrong. Europol statistics for the years 2006-2009 for example show that only about 0,5% of all (successful or attempted) terrorist attacks in Europe during that period were carried out by islamists - the vast majority was carried out by separatists and radical left- and right-wingers. People just have a different impression because terrorist attacks carried out by islamists seem more interesting to the citizens and thus receive much more media coverage, and the media also has a tendency to use the word "terrorism" primarily for attacks carried out by islamists. Remember that there is not even a commonly accepted definition of "terrorism" - in practice, it's usually the governments etc. that decide who is publically being called a "terrorist".

And even those terrorist attacks carried out by islamists are usually not really linked to islamic beliefs. It's obvious that the real motivation for their attacks has nothing to do with what many people believe to be "Jihad" (muslims fighting unbelievers/non-muslims for religious beliefs) by looking at the fact that about 90% of all victims of islamic terrorists are muslims themselves.

So as long as people believe that what drives people into doing such things really has to do with islamic beliefs, their "solutions" will most probably only make things worse because they don't understand the problem in its wholeness.
Instead, you'd have to look at common underlying psychological problems of the individuals who carry out such attacks, and realize that radical islam is just one flavour that these problems can become manifest in. Look what people like Anders Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, the Zarnajews and even the common shooting spree killers have in common. But unfortunately such topics are not publically discussed; we usually don't accept that they were probably pretty average young people and really try to understand what caused them to act in such a horrible way. Instead, we simply demonize them, we are unwilling to accept that given the "right" circumstances, even ourselves might have been able to do something like this. That makes it easier for us but unfortunately doesn't lead to actually understanding the problem and thus being able to solve/reduce it.