Islamic State’s rise is more than cause and effect

Mehdi Hasan’s claim (We accept Russian bombs can provoke a terror backlash. Our bombs can too, 18 November) that it is “verboten in our public discourse” to point to a link between western policy and terrorist attacks is rather undermined by the fact that he is able to make that claim in your pages and the many other national media outlets he writes for. Other commentators in the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman and (indeed) the Daily Mail have frequently aired the blowback explanation for terrorism.

But if this is all that is being said, surely it is banal. I suppose there may be some rightwing cranks who think Islamic State has grown among young Muslim people because they are bloodthirsty masochists or some such nonsense. Obviously, Isis and other Islamist terror organisations point to real things in the real world to build a base, or they wouldn’t have one.