Islamic Militancy: It is their problem

Mr. Hussain writes: 
<There is an internal history to the matter too.>

This comment is a typical text book renunciation of world systems analysis.  I 
see it over and over again.  It sounds reasonable.  We need to take into 
account the interactions (intersections?) of the local and the global, and, as 
the critique goes, world systems fails to do that in so far as it places 
primary emphasis on the "external". Hence, such people argue that those who use 
a world systems methodology blame everything on the larger system.  Totality 
gone too far, we need more island than ocean (Sherry Ortner), so to say.

Some questions I'd like to ask of the above comments:

I meet a poor, working class male who works at Wal Mart and earns a minimum 
wage.  Does he earn low wages because a) he is enveloped by a culture of 
poverty and can't seem to acquire the proper cultural traits needed to become a 
Bill Gates? or b) he is enveloped by a system of exploitation that ultimately 
requires a minimum wage class to reproduce the wealth of a Bill Gates? 

Most of us on this Listserv, I have a feeling, would probably say that the 
first response is "blaming the victim" and would prefer to look at the larger 
system to explain the circumstances of this Wal Mart employee.  Some of my 
students, however, would respond by saying such a perspective "blames society" 
for all the ills of what they view are the shortcomings of this particular 
working class male.  "He should have worked harder, received an education, 
saved money and started a business, and . . ."  
The criticism that we need to consider what's happening "within" a given 
region, culture, gender, class, ... is not unlike the response giving by some 
of my students. Hussain's comment that "it is entirely facile to try to locate 
the roots of contemporary Islamic inspired militancy exclusively in terms of 
capitalism, modernity, peripheralization, etc" is very similar to the response 
I would get, lets say, from a social scientist like Oscar Lewis who would say 
that "you leftist blame the larger society for everything when obviously the 
problem stems from the fact that this Wal Mart worker has learned from his 
family negative traits that led him to his poor, miserable life."  The two are 
not unlike each other.  For Hussain, some Muslims have learned that Islam means 
holy war from past historical cultures of their own making and now have carried 
this cultural baggage into the modern era.  For Lewis, the Wal Mart employee 
has learned negative qualities like "immediate gratification" in his childhood 
and is now i
n his adult life reproducing his parents bad qualities.

While we see the problem with the culture of poverty thesis ("blaming the 
victim"), many of us have no problem accepting it on a world systems level.  
Instead, we get caught up in this internal versus external dichotomy and fail 
to see that these concepts also perform the legitimization of people like Bill 
Gates or, even worse, that those Muslims have a problem unrelated to our own 
doing.  "They are a militant culture who send their children to be martyrs."  
"They have their culture and we have ours." I guess we should all say God Bless 
America and Bill Gates. Lets support Bush in the War against Terrorism.

Khaldoun Samman