Muslims care for one another. Nationality or your ethnic background does not stop one Muslim caring or helping another Muslim. Of course we help other Muslims according to Islamic principles and are not supposed to step outside the boundaries.
That is how I think Andrew Ibrahim felt, though he took the wrong course of action by making explosives. He wanted to get himself noticed and I conclude he was just looking for attention. He got interested in the wrong people, past Muslim suicide bombers and believed violence was the answer to the entire problem. Of course he was wrong.
This is why I stress for the American government and other Western countries to mind their own business. The American government used violence to sort out issues in the Middle East. Using violence does not work. Both sides loose.
If America improves on their foreign policy, listen for a change, and then people will not take drastic action. We could see decrease in terrorist activities.
There are just some abnormal things going on here. Some guy in England, who has never been wronged by any actions from the British government apparently thinks it would make sense to blow himself up among civilians in a shopping centre. What mindset causes that to happen to someone who otherwise has a quiet life far away from any war zone and suffering?
I completely agree with you that changes to Western foreign policy can help to alleviate the situation. But I also think there is something unique to the Muslim response to what are essentially local conflicts. There is an ideology at play here that turns what are regional conflicts into a global problem. IMHO Muslims cannot just blame the escalation over the last decade or so on the West.
Like I noted, there are two major issues here. Framing of conflicts in a way that escalates them and the fact that waging war for Islam is apparently a privatized endaeavor. Ideology (in this case religion) generally determines why to fight, who has to fight and how to fight. Islam prescribes all these things.
Firstly, there is the Islamic framing of conflicts, with its strong sense of victimization and powerful siege mentality. Everything is immediately framed as being a "War on Islam" by filthy kuffar who want nothing less than the destruction of Islam. I think this is rooted in strong and negative stereotypes about non-Muslims in some interpretations of Islam. Heck, look at sites like Islam-qa.com and you should understand what I mean. These negative views of the kuffar and this Pan-Islamic nationalism (aka Ummah) are making conflicts that are essentially local and about land or power (Palestine, Iraq-Kuwait, Chechnya) into global problems with a religious dimension. Suddenly every Muslim everywhere is involved and every conflict is a war on Islam. That is pretty unique IMHO, such a strong sense of brotherhood and the 'religionization' of everything.
So now wars involving Muslims are religious wars against Islam and in a religious war every Muslim has the religious duty to fight jihad. But since there is no Caliph, every Tom, Dick and Harry sets up his own enterprise to fulfill this religious duty. War is privatized. It is not fought by authorities, but by bands of religious fighters. And all this is authorized by scholars. You see this everywhere in the Islamic world and IMHO it is unique on this scale. It is similar to what happened with Communism at some point, namely during the Spanish civil war.
But these groups don't care at all about the wishes of the authorities and have their own dynamics and beliefs. For example, one of the most important grievances of Bin Laden in his 'Declaration of War' against the Crusaders and Polytheists (US) was the 'occupation' of the lands of the two Holy Places. He didn't care that US troops were in Saudi Arabia with the explicit permission of the Saudi authorities, to him it was an offense to his religion. To the Americans there was no religious dimension at all, they had their own geo-political motivations and so did the Arab governments that supported them. Ideology created a conflict where there essentially was none, since politically the Saudi's and Americans agreed. A private organization vowed to wage war against the wishes of the legitimate authorities and very much managed to escalate by bombings of US targets.
At some point apparently a precedent was set in the Islamic world that made war the business of private groups and not states. This is generally accepted and even praised in Islamic circles, because it allows Muslims to fulfill their religious duty for Jihad. To many these people are heroes. But since these jihadist organizations can never match the states they fight in their military power, they had to seek alternative ways to wage war. They had to use asymmetric means of warfare and fight like guerrillas. Which means they turn to bombings. And while Islam despises suicide, it glorifies dying for ones religion. When being desperate and fighting a superior foe (be it the Israelis, Soviet Union, United States or even their own 'apostate' governments) one seeks all the help one can get. Fueled by this incredible desire to please Allah and fight for ones religion this inevitably leads to 'martyrdom operations', simply because these human smart bombs are so much more effective than a normal 'dumb' bomb. Many Muslims obviously object to this method, but there is clearly disagreement among scholars, so the issue remains unsettled. So despite some doubts about their methods these groups are nevertheless perceived as fighting a just cause and get widespread respect and support.
So while I agree Western foreign policy is an important cause for the escalation, it is most certainly not the only one IMHO. There are some unique dynamics at play here that turn a British boy, who is otherwise not involved in the conflict into a wannabe suicide bomber.
