Response to Vijay Prashad's Article

The following is the response to Vijay Prashad's article on the Hindu citing economic reasons for the surge in ISIS violence in Iraq. 
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Vijay Prashad’s article on ‘The Pendulum of the Islamic State’ on the The Hindu dated 06-09-2014 was thoroughly informative on the status quo of the conflict between IS and the Iraqi – Syrian regimes. Apart from that, it was a futile and totally off-the-mark assessment of what really caused the uprising. Prashad’s accusation of the ‘neo-liberal policies that increased inequality and despair and corruption’ is an oversimplified analysis of a vexing issue. Forest fires are more rampant in those years when ice-cream sales soar, but do ice-creams cause forest fires?

When it comes to violence motivated by religious ideology, we have consistently been reluctant to point the finger at the real culprit – fanaticism. People’s conception of what their religion teaches – real or perceived – is the cause of so much killing. Unless we identify the real reason, whatever we may do will turn out to be ineffective. Of course, there is repression, inequality and despair in Iraq or Syria, but not in these states alone! They are everywhere, in India, in Africa or even in America, but nowhere there is a conflagration which can even remotely be compared in scale to the atrocities of IS. We have to accept religious fanaticism as the motive. What else might be the reason that prompts educated young men from affluent backgrounds in India and Europe to travel to Iraq to take part in the fight on IS’ behalf? The perpetrators of 9/11 were also rich and educated young men with decent family backgrounds. “With or without religion, good people do good and bad people do bad, but for good people to do bad, that takes religion” as Steven Weinberg once remarked.

Unless we recognize religious fanaticism as the root cause of the present violence in the world and indoctrination from a young age as the way in which it is cultivated, nothing good will come out of wasting newspaper space for irrelevant articles like the one mentioned above, which itself is suspected to be of the product of another kind of fanaticism – the political!