Mentalities

When commentators blame formal bodies of ideas or 'isms' rather than people for the things they apparently find seriously problematic, they are quite often trying to camouflage another kind of ism altogether: race-ism.

"I'm not against Jews, I'm anti-Zionist" or indeed "Islam represents a threat to our way of life." 

And the people who don't mind being considered shamelessly bigoted tend to blame aspects of those groups they regard as complicit in propagating the phenomenon they hate, which are usually only tangentially related to it, if at all. 

Even when it's not one of these surrogate attributions, we are still dealing with a subset of the major fallacies which persist in our culture about how live action History actually works.

Neither Karl Marx and his book nor Mohammed and his book are directly responsible for the inhumanities later committed in their name. 

These detached dogmas function a bit like chemical agents which in some people engender, or more often accentuate, what historians often refer to as a 'mentality' (or more pretentiously, a mentalité.)

It is these that we need to watch most closely, not texts or the way people dress etc. The conflicts surrounding us are driven by complex dynamics which include impersonal situations and cultural factors, but ultimately it is nearly always the aforementioned mentalities which provide the key impetus.

If you understand how they form, you can start to appreciate how they can be either encouraged or discouraged.

Focusing on how people look, where they are from geographically, what information they consume and spread, can often be an unnecessary distraction.