Islam is not the cause. El País, January 1, 2017.

Jihadist attacks are mainly aimed at the Muslim world.

Without a doubt, jihadism can score a point: sow chaos, spread panic, normalise the state of emergency.
Celebrating the arrival of the new year is no longer the same, it must be done, as last night, in squares surrounded by concrete blocks, with the collective fear of another truck attack like those in Nice or Berlin.
Similarly, flying was not the same after 9/11, with governments piling up layer upon layer of security, asking passengers to give up their privacy when appropriate.
Walking among police officers in bulletproof vests and assault rifles is now normal in Madrid, London or Berlin.

And despite the fear and discomfort that the jihadists have brought to the West, nothing can compare to the permanent terror in which they have plunged the Islamic world, their worst victim.
No, Istanbul is not a distant city in a country in the hands of radicals where terrorism is protected by certain powers that be.
Muslims have no other concept of life and death, as some analysts have ventured to proclaim.
Turkey is a modern, democratic country, with conservative and progressive forces in collision, the former capital of a caliphate and an empire and under the aegis of Islam, a religion that in its orthodoxy preaches peace and tolerance.
As the Qur’an says, “there is no compulsion in religion.”
With the attack on a hall where the entrance was celebrated in 2017, there are 300 deaths in a year in a nation of 74 million, in many ways closer to Europe and the dreams and ambitions of its citizens than, for example, Russia.
It is true that the party that now governs is trying to perpetuate itself in power and suffers from authoritarian tics against the media and the opposition.
And despite this, it is a country where journalism, art, dissidence, education and the desire for progress continue to struggle to make their way even in the most adversity moments.
Something similar has happened in the largest Arab nation, Egypt, thrown into the arms of Marshal Abdel Fattah Al Sisi a few years ago while the most radical Islamism has ended up eradicating one of its greatest sources of income, tourism.
In 2016 alone, some 350 people were killed in terrorist attacks in Egypt: tourists, police, Christians and, above all, innocent civilians.
Egypt is a nation of 90 million inhabitants in which almost 30% live below the poverty level, which in that country is estimated at 25 euros per month.
It is a diverse, vibrant society, with prominent dissidents, intellectuals and writers, men and women.
According to the various specialized non-governmental organizations, 21,000 people died worldwide in 2016 due to Islamist terrorism, if we include the massacres of the Islamic State in Syria, another parasite that managed to kill the legitimate opposition to Bashar al-Assad with the ultimate effect of strengthening the latter’s regime.
And yet, somehow, in its self-absorption, the West sees these attacks in Turkey, Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan as the normality of the Islamic world, the result of obeying a religion that we do not know and that seems to shelter violence, as we think we remember from having read it in some history book.
However, no religious book of Islam can find any justification for all this death and violence.
We have suffered from the irrationality of terrorism for centuries, and not only for religious reasons, but also for political, ideological and nationalist reasons, as we know well in Spain.
This lust for death and blood is not born of creeds but of ruins: those of states crushed by fratricidal wars, Soviet or American, in states that Western colonialism prevented from progressing while devouring their resources.
The context from which they are born is not Islam, it is poverty, lack of hope, lack of help, lack of education, all fodder for ignorance. And yet, the easiest solution is simply to target Islam, as do the extremism on the rise in Europe and the team with which the new leader of the free world, Donald Trump, will arrive in the White House in three weeks.
They do not want to see the real reasons for the global problem, because they do not understand nuances.
After all, these new powers of the West have been built on fear, rejection, walls, deportations and the refusal of any concessions.
DAVID ALANDETE, EL PAÍS.
01.01.17 Original link: http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2017/01/01/actualidad/1483277734_781573.html?rel=lom