There are certainly people out there who think in simplex terms, They want all conclusions on terror to be easy. There’s a whole religious and nationalist lobby out there that likes to drive that perception too.

The simplex thinkers want the only factor to be one religion. That way they can buttress their fear and bigotry, rather than deal with so many complex factors of fucked updedness about the Middle East and Asian subcontinent. That way they can make 1.5 billion people the “other” have have their fricken holy war.

It’s never that simplex, it’s not just Islam. It’s monarchies that stretch back to times before Islam existed, it’s tribal nationalism and xenophobia, it’s masses of backwards uneducated medieval level serfs (land reform in the ME and Subcontinent baddddddly needed everywhere.) It’s rulers who think the way to keep themselves strong is to fuck up their neighbors every chance they get, and put subversive groups inside their neighbor’s realms to ensure that they can.
It’s poverty, it’s energy paucity, it’s ignorance, it’s disease, it’s despair, it’s all of the above and it’s real humans who are caught in that grinder of complex factors, and most of them just want to survive it as long as they can.