I want to put together that gets more in depth on that, but it'll have to be for another time.

Suffice to say I think it is a cultural problem, just like I do think that gang violence is a cultural problem. What I object to is the racialization of the cultural problem. I only do that towards white people for its rhetorical shock value. Race and culture are not the same thing, but so many people can't move past that so we can't actually talk about what the cultural problem is. Black people didn't decide to face housing discrimination and or be denied employment opportunities. Culture is developed through circumstance, not through some innate racial mindset. Similarly I don't think there is something genetically unique to white men that makes them go on rampages I think that their particular circumstances, like those of others, narrow certain paths and personalities, while widening others.

As for the second point you made....well, I do agree that our meddling has allowed for a vacuum of power in that region, which ISIS filled in a way that Al Qaeda never could, I wouldn't take all the agency away from the people in ISIS. I'm against blanket Islamophobia, but it wouldn't be prudent to think of it as something other than a political ideology. It is after all running a state. The fact that it is connected to a holy book is significant, but no more so than how our religious devotion to our founding documents shapes and complicates the choices we've made in the past and continue to make.

These are real people, following a set of beliefs that they believe will allow them to operate on a global scale. We shouldn't lose sight of that and make it all about us.

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts..." -The Bard