I have seen several people express opinions which would allow me to immediately excuse what Daesh has done in Brussels as completely legitimate and okay

It's the opposite logic. Because ISIS thinks it's ok to bomb out civilians for supporting western values, we should apply the same stratagem to them. Currently we cripple ourselves when dealing with them, and they attempt to go all out on us.

Without getting into it more, it's something of a moral line some people aren't willing to cross, even if it's necessary to defeat ISIS.

Well, it can easily be argued that somewhere between colonialism and our [Western] recent adventures in the region Daesh finds some suitable explanation why they are completely legitimate to retaliate in this way without any problems (a single drone strike killing a bunch of bunch of children should be enough, but I'm sure something much more interesting can be found). That's the core problem with 'an eye for an eye' and similar crap: it escalates really quickly and everyone ends up blind.

There is one thing I would clearly label as worse than the current breed of Daesh terrorists and that is a state stooping to such terrorist measures. Before we do that with a smile we should rather hand everyone a shotgun and go for 'last man standing'. The longterm effects are pretty much the same and we just save everyone time and effort.

Because by that logic all it takes is some guy being shot by someone (possibly by police, possibly unjustified), some group he belongs to feeling justified in doing something similar against the previous perpetrator group and from there on the system keeps itself alive while gaining momentum. After all, that is pretty much how all of these conflicts work.

It's the opposite logic. Because ISIS thinks it's ok to bomb out civilians for supporting western values, we should apply the same stratagem to them.

But this DOES. NOT. WORK.

They bomb us; we resolve to fight them harder and resolve to carry on as before.

If we started bombing and blowing up the area as we felt like it then it would run nicely to their narrative that The West is the enemy and doesn't give a shit about them and should be blown up.

If we started doing air strikes and killing civilian populations WE WILL LOSE THIS CONFLICT.

Not crossing the line is the thing which will LET US WIN.

The fact you can't seem to grasp this makes me glad you aren't in control of the military in you country...

Well, we could just kill everyone there. That would fix the problem. Except for the shocked part of our own population, some of which might be inclined to take up arms against an obviously evil government. But then we can kill them too. Maybe we might even reach a stable point after some time. And then it starts up again, America vs Europe because someone on a forum made a snide comment about American gun culture and it scaled up from there.

I'm going to add that the whole post is one large blob of sarcasm and hyperbole to drive a point home. I'm not actively advocating genocide.

There's always been violent sects, but Islamic terrorism in it's current form is a very modern phenomenon. The modern founders of this ideology were originally non-violent anti-liberals who popped up in the 50's, but we tortured the hate into them. We then created the entire concept of the "foreign fighter" and the modern jihad when we recruited stupid young men to fight a proxy war against the soviets for us. Coincidentally(?), it's only after this campaign of funded Islamism that this list begins. Also coincidentally(?), the list explodes after the "war on terror".

That's not to mention that we literally illegally destroyed the nations or Iraq and Libya and converted them into hotbeds of terrorism. In the latter case we actually directly funded the Islamist and handed them the failed state on a silver platter, just like 1980's Afghanistan all over again... Meanwhile we were funding Islamists in Syria and supplying / training them, as were and are our allies, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

To me, it seems ass-backwards to wring our hands after events like this and wonder what we should be doing to fix the problem, when we are literally creating the problem.

Stop voting for invaders and paying taxes to their armies. I'm sorry, but wars of aggression are wrong. It's pretty damn simple.

The US army originally wasn't supposed to exist, and then was only supposed to be used defensively following a declaration of war. The last time that happened was WW2. Since then, they've illegally invaded Korea, Lebanon, Cuba, the Congo, Domincan Republic, Vietnam, Thailand, Grenada, Iran, Republic of Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Herzegovina/Serbia/Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria without ever producing a declaration of war. And that's the official list. There's economic, political, proxy and black acts of war also carried out with plausible deniability against almost every other country in the world. There's countless democracies overthrown by CIA-backed coups, and propped up dictators. This is not freedom; this is a rogue state...

Bush Jr. started the current US war against Syria - it goes back that far! It wasn't a real declared war of course -- Bush only got congress to approve a proxy war by funding anti-government forces there - i.e. stirring up civil war... Obama continued those programs, actually invaded it with the US military, and conspired to destroy Libya beforehand too, by funding the terrorist rebellion there, along with a secret Egyptian ground invasion and air support from NATO countries.

Start respecting sovereignty, stop destroying parts of civilization, and the barbarians will stop appearing in those voids.

Don't obsess over the symptoms, address the actual illness: war.

To me, it seems ass-backwards to wring our hands after events like this and wonder what we should be doing to fix the problem, when we are literally creating the problem.

Oddly enough I had much the same discussion/argument with Americans in the aftermath of 9/11, when those I knew at the time couldn't understand why anyone would want to attack America...

Apparently, despite them being 10 years older than me at the time they hadn't been paying attention to their nation's foreign policy...

To me, it seems ass-backwards to wring our hands after events like this and wonder what we should be doing to fix the problem, when we are literally creating the problem.

Oddly enough I had much the same discussion/argument with Americans in the aftermath of 9/11, when those I knew at the time couldn't understand why anyone would want to attack America...
Apparently, despite them being 10 years older than me at the time they hadn't been paying attention to their nation's foreign policy...

In one of the documents cited as Bin Laden's confession for 9/11, he explains his decision to try to attack the twin towers came to him in 1982 while standing in Lebanon and watching American(-made) Jets bomb civilian apartment blocks, and dreaming that "the tyrant should be punished with the same".

How anyone can get away with brushing this off and replacing it with "they hate our freedom" is beyond me.

I certainly don't want to deny the incredible amount of meddling/bombing we have done in the region over the years, but I think a few more factors should be added to the mix instead of going all single-minded on that.

One important issue is certainly Saudi Arabia. I was unaware of that until recently but in 1979 (I believe, might be off by a year or two) they suffered their own terrorist attack (extremely bloody, hundreds of dead, ...). Their reaction was to stomp down extremely hard on the groups responsible but also moving where those groups ultimately wanted towards where those groups wanted the society to move: towards an extremely conservative and narrow form of Islam which we now know to be the problem (we are worried about Salafism but the Saudi Wahhabism is an even stricter form of that).
And unfortunately they have tons of money to export that. Granted, most of that is our money we paid for oil so in a way, it's our fault as well but this is nonetheless one important piece of the puzzle. Unless the Saudi interpretational sovereignty on Islam can be broken I don't see much hope for things getting better down the road.

I should not have to say that but 'starting to bomb Saudi Arabia' is not a good plan to follow.

But my point is they still didn't go out and indiscriminately target civilians and there was no reason for the average citizen in the UK to be scared of being blown up.

The official figures for the IRA attacks include ~650 civilian deaths. So I beg to differ, especially for anyone who happened to live in Northern Ireland at the time.

Great points there @Hodgman.

Get back ISIS territory, kill all ISIS mercenaries where ever you find them (hopefully the international ISIS fighters are among them so they cannot return), stick the western ISIS fighters that didn't got killed into jail for a long time (I would court martial them, they should be treated as soldiers that commited high treason, but then people don't like things run in military way, I accept that). Find all the sources of financing that ISIS had, and shut them down.

The problem here is that ISIS are currently being funded (at least in part) by Turkey. Also, the Kurds are doing a huge amount against ISIS, but, Turkey is also attacking the Kurds. In short, Turkey is a NATO ally, but also aiding ISIS both directly and indirectly. It makes the situation politically difficult.