US policy explains popular support for terrorism rather than terrorists’ motives

Evidence

Bruce Robbins is rather more clear-eyed, even as he invokes the caustic phrase “chickens coming home to roost,” used about 9/11, when noting the effects of “years of bipartisan U.S. support for corrupt and undemocratic Arab regimes and Zionist outrages against Palestinians, about global economic networks seemingly designed to ensure that Egyptian or Pakistani or Indonesian farmers will never approach the income or life expectancy of American sales clerks and waitresses.… [T]he policies of the U.S. government, the WTO [World Trade Organization], the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank may not explain the motives of the killers, but they explain why the killers received and receive such widespread support.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 469

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: A usable distinction: explaining structural grievance (Robbins) vs. explaining individual motive — the reader can deploy this to separate what fiction does versus what it claims.