I just thought I'd highlight this article by former U.K Muslim extremist Hassan Butt from the beginning of this month.

It's important because it destroys the argument of the apologists that Islamist violence is a result of Western foreign policy, poverty, checkpoints and all the other crap. Straight from the horses mouth Hassan Butt refutes this notion and gives it to us straight; Islamist terror is borne from a corrupt, twisted and violent ideology, nothing else. Read the full Daily Mail article here, excerpts below.

“When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network - a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology - I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this "Blair's bombs" line did our propaganda work for us

More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

For example, on Saturday on Radio 4's Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: "What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq."...

And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.”