I said "possibly even marginally legitimising it", Hamm.......and left it as an open question.
Regardless, there is no parallel between Gaza and Paris.
The incursion into Gaza was - right or wrong - in response to rocket-attacks on Israel by Hamas. We've discussed that topic to death on here before, my position is known, and I'm not going to repeat it here.
The motivation behind the Paris attacks is a combination of blind-hatred of the West and a bizarre form of religious nihilism. And as Clivex has subsequently pointed-out, there are countries who had no part in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, who now find themselves in the Jihadists cross-hairs, which further dilutes the argument that the Iraq War is at the root of the problem.
On a wider point, if something so trivial as a picture can upset the majority of the world's 1 Billion Muslims, then the game is a bogey. It exposes a massive and fundamental (excuse the pun) difference in the value systems of Muslims and - well - 'everyone else'.......or to put it another way, between those who want to live under the Laws of God, and those who want to live under the Laws of Man.
There is self-evidently no room for manoeuvre on the part of Muslims, and there is zero appetite to go back to the Middle Ages on the part of everyone else. It's for these reasons that I believe we are ultimately heading for a global conflict between Islam and 'everyone else'. The Jihadis will very-likely get their wish, because there is only so much that 'everyone else' will put up with, before they start seeing every Muslim as a potential threat......something we can see in embryonic form in parts of France already.
