Welllllllll...
The crusades were partly in response to Muslim expansion. By 750 AD the Umayyads had conquered everything from Iran to Egypt, across (the rest of) North Africa, up through Spain and even had a bit of Southern France. Christendom was, reasonably, fucking terrified. It took Spain nearly 800 years to get the whole of Spain back during which the Abassids held on to the rest of what the Umayyads had taken and even got hold of Sicily (which would be a worry to the Vatican, understandably) from time to time.
After the Ottomans conquered Constantinople (partly due to European duplicity, ironically) in 1453 it kinda opened the floodgates and they rapidly took the Balkans and got as far into Europe as Vienna (they didn't take Vienna but they got close to it).
This is alongside the sometimes Muslim Khanates which were holding various parts of Russia and Eastern Europe off and on during the same period.
(I've been playing
far too much
CK2)
So it's not like the crusades were *totally* out of the blue. From the point of view of Christian Europe there had been a looming threat for a good thousand years.
So yeah, Christianity and Islam have been fighting pretty much continuously since about the 7th Century.
The problem is that, by modern times, Europe/Christianity/The West had won but carried on fucking them up anyway. And handing Israel back to the Jews obviously didn't help. Nor did fighting proxy wars with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan etc..
So yeah, I'd agree that 'we' ('The West') created Al Qaeda through our actions in the 20th Century. Or at least created the conditions under which they were likely to arise.
Al Qaeda had demands and were understandable as a political entity. They wanted to *hurt* the West and/but also had specific goals within Muslim countries. They were organised in cells with a sort of peer-to-peer structure and thus, basically, resembled the political terrorist/freedom fighter organisations we're familiar with and have existed for a long time. Because of their loose organisation, really an umbrella organisation for groups with overlapping aims, they're often described as a franchise, which seems apt.
IS are different. For starters they're organised hierarchically, not as cells. They are unmistakably one organisation, not a collective/franchise. They have no demands, they're not trying to use terrorism to force Western governments to do anything in particular or deliver anything in particular.
Their power is based on land and they're taking it. Conquering it. Al Qaeda never did that, it would be counter to what they were (hidden, for starters). IS isn't trying to hide. Nor are they political in the same way that Al Qaeda were. They're not trying to force Western or Middle Eastern governments into doing anything in particular, they're just conquering.
And the reason for all this is that they have a very particular interpretation of Islam which is, aside from everything else, apocalyptic. They don't want anything from the West other than to provoke them to war in order to bring about the end times.
And, luckily for them, many American protestants have an apocalyptic interpretation of Christianity (hence the importance of Israel to, amongst others, the Republican Party) so they may well get what they want if the Republicans get in.
Anyway, sorry, my actual point was that while I agree that the West was pretty much entirely culpable for the creation of Al Qaeda (as well as various regional dictators and all kinds of fuckery), I think the West and Middle Eastern countries created IS together. We set the conditions and they let it happen (often fomenting or at least using radical sentiments to their own ends).
IS are properly evil.
EDITED: 24 Nov 2015 08:11 by X3N0PH0N
