No, AC, I don't think the entire Muslim world are gullible puppets on the end of a string from Langley or Georgetown or wherever: they think for themselves and for better or worse, that's not necessarily how people in the West think, and it never has been. I suggest that we should have enough respect for Muslims (and everybody else, of course) to try to grasp that their history, stories, ideologies, mindsets, God, sense of how the world works, is not necessarily the same as those of people raised on Hollywood sit-coms or NCIS or Home and Away.

I have no trouble perceiving what happens in the Middle East and North Africa as most certainly home-grown, endogenous, the unfolding of how people there see the world and how to overcome their conflicts with the West. Surely, if there is any lesson to be learnt from what is going on across that region, it is that the West is ideologically powerless to a very large extent - it does NOT dictate to the world, and most certainly does not impose its ideologies holus-bolus on that part of the world, and never has. And probably never will.

[Ordinary] Joe