Advantage that the west has gifted to Isis

Three British soldiers sit on a gun captured from Egyptian forces during the Suez crisis, 21 November 1956. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

Ironically perhaps Isis refers (Front page, 19 November) to the perpetrators of the Paris atrocities as its “brave knights”. The quotation illustrates an advantage Isis exploits, an advantage of which the western powers voluntarily deprive themselves, namely a historical perspective. In the past century the west has time and again cheated and violated Arab and Muslim communities. Sykes-Picot (1916), Balfour (1917), UN Resolution 181 (1948), Mosaddeq (1953), Suez (1956), Jordan and Lebanon (1958) and Iraq (2003) are all instances where aggression and duplicity have marked the west’s behaviour.

If you wish to defeat an enemy, first understand him. Western politicians choose to ignore these antecedents, deny responsibility for them or minimise their significance: nothing to do with us. Isis makes them the context to justify any act of vengeance, however barbaric.
David Butler
London

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