One week after Scotland voted by a narrow margin against independence, British Prime Minister David Cameron secured a huge parliamentary majority of 534 to 43 to back airstrikes against the forces of the Islamic State in Iraq. The general public in Britain are supportive of this return to war in Iraq. This popular support was secured by the horror off seeing Internet videos of the decapitation of British and U.S. hostages by IS killers. These macabre beheadings were theatrical executions staged for the Internet and social media dissemination. Despite the widespread belief that fighting IS is a justified and necessary battle against a medieval, fundamentalist Islamic army, the reality is quite different.

It is now 13 years since Sept. 11, 2001, when two airplanes hit the Twin Towers in New York, causing them to collapse. Osama Bin Laden was blamed as the mastermind of the al-Qaeda network, and a predominantly Saudi Arabian cell carried out the attack. But the videos of the beheadings of Westerners in Iraq and Syria that are circulating on the Internet show IS fighters from Britain and other Western countries.

True, David Cameron and other Western leaders admit that home grown terrorists are a problem. And a raft of measures promise to stamp out the promotion of jihadist-terrorist ideology in Britain's schools, colleges, universities and mosques. About 5 to10 percent of the IS forces in Iraq and Syria are said to be British, and perhaps 30 percent are from the West as a whole. So what is the root cause of this defection of Westerners to IS?

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