It is now often said that to fight Islamic terrorism, countries or the international community must first identify and then address the root cause. But what is the so-called root cause?

Let us examine this critically with specific details so that the argument for the root cause approach is not subtly used to justify propaganda for Islamic terrorism.

Is it poverty? Many non-Muslim Asians like the the Chinese, Vietnamese, Indians or Indonesians once experienced absolute poverty. Many are probably still experiencing various degrees of relative poverty.

But have we ever heard of them flying planes into crowed buildings in broad daylight, or throwing bombs into pubs or diplomatic missions, killing clerics of other religions or beheading innocent hostages like Margaret Hassan in Iraq ?

Surely the money to make bombs, to learn to fly aeroplanes, to acquire explosives and to set up terrorist logistics and infrastructure could have been better be spent to buy bread, milk, school textbooks or toys for the children.

As a matter of verifiable fact, many of the Islamic terrorists today, like Osama bin Laden, come from wealthy families and educated backgrounds.

Their stated objective is not to fight for socio-economic justice for Muslims, but for the nihilistic destruction of the United States, Israel and their allies and friends, the withdrawal of foreign troops from Saudi Arabia and Iraq and the re-establishment of the bygone Islamic empire on earth. These are obviously not bread-and-butter issues.

Liberal and left academics or intellectuals must not attribute to the Islamic terrorists what they themselves do not have in mind. To do otherwise is dishonest and misleading.

What could the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York or the violent deaths of innocent people, including Muslims themselves in Indonesia, southern Thailand, India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Spain or the Netherlands contribute to the betterment of the material lives of Muslims or for that matter, any community of human beings?

As MS has argued in Islamists must cease finding scapegoats in the past , many non-Muslim countries, which were once poor and oppressed have advanced economically and politically without resorting to terrorism of the kind practised today by Islamists.

Also, not all incidents of poverty are caused by what some Islamists and their Western liberal and leftist friends claim to be Western capitalist exploitation or globalisation. Some are results of natural disasters, climatic conditions or other environmental factors (like soil condition).

Many others could be due to nepotism, cronyism and corruption of domestic governments led by Muslim leaders inside the Islamic world (like Suharto's Indonesia)

Note that Western and American multinational companies are today welcomed by communist China and Vietnam as a solution to the problems of unemployment, poverty and technological backwardness.

The root cause, I submit, are those wrong ideas, incorrect attitudes, deformed psychology and false beliefs among some Islamists (not all Muslims) that have been so concisely presented by MS in the aforementioned letter.