Here, in a piece by Ian Buruma, is something that I too have been arguing for a while (see, for example, this):
[T]he kind of violence currently directed at targets associated with the West, from the World Trade Center to a discothèque in Bali, is not just about the United States. Nor can it be reduced to global economics. Even those who have good reason to blame their poverty on harsh forms of U.S.-backed capitalism do not normally blow themselves up in public places to kill the maximum number of unarmed civilians. We do not hear of suicide bombers from the slums of Rio or Bangkok.
Buruma goes on to diagnose an ‘Occidentalist’ form of anti-modernism as being at work. I disagree with with what he says about the Iraq war towards the end, but it’s an interesting piece.
Not all dreams of local authenticity and cultural uniqueness are noxious, or even wrong… [T]he poetic romanticism of 19th-century German idealists was often a welcome antidote to the dogmatic rationalism that came with the Enlightenment.
It is when purity or authenticity, of faith or race, leads to purges of the supposedly inauthentic, of the allegedly impure, that mass murder begins.
(Hat tip: Anthony Cox.)