[simonh]

If that was true all Muslims would support ISIS but they don't. The ones that do largely come from and are based in the section of Iraq that got most massively screwed over in the US lead invasion. You're telling me that's purely a co-incidence?

There's no excuse for what ISIS does. No reason is strong enough for the kind of barbarity they practice, but characterising it as purely senseless and ignoring the actual reasons behind it doesn't help either. The actual reasons they do what they do may not be sufficient or reasonable relative to their actions, and may not actually align well with their rhetoric, but they do exist.

[philh]

> If that was true all Muslims would support ISIS but they don't.

Different people react to things differently, interpret things differently, take ideas more or less seriously, and so on.

I think the reasoning: "if ISIS was about religion, then all muslims would support ISIS", would approximately equally support: "if ISIS was about foreign policy, then all Iraqis would support ISIS".

I don't think either of those if-thens holds as an if-then, regardless of the truth value of the "if" part.