Explosion at Brussels Airport (Update: also at Molenbeek metro station) 34 dead

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ugh. horrid.

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given that by far most domestic Islamic terrorists are homegrown nationals, how the  would stopping refugees help?

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I think nilism is an appropriate. I mean, al-quada as bad as they were (never a sentence opener I thought I'd write) believed in the very intellectual crusade to establish Islamism or whatever. ISIS is something far worse, a nightmarish hybrid of a teen fad and the People's Temple. There is no point to the crimes of ISIS, just a Clockwork Orange style desire to indulge in mindless id-inspired violence. Look at the sort of propaganda they put out (not too hard to find, open a newspaper), it isn't theological (something that could be targeted by working with mosques etc) it's psychological.

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A better comparison might be the anarchist movement of the late 19th and early 20th century IMO.

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As much as - as a leftist - I'd like to boil the issue of terrorism down to poverty and inequality and class; it doesn't really work (much like people trying to boil the issue down to religion). The world is too complicated for such singular issues; and terrorists and jihadis draw their ranks from people of all income groups. The only constant is that terrorists are normally young men; further evidence for that old canard that societies fall on the backs of bored youth.

The reason I brought up anarchism is because the parallels are pretty obvious. Although the anarchist terror campaign was partially a media hysteria campaign, in its heyday there was a pretty terrifying death toll: five world leaders dead, a good few bombing campaigns (in NYC, in Barcelona, in Paris). Although for obvious reasons there was no 9/11 you could bet that if jet planes or skyscrapers had existed back then, well...

Like Islamism, anarchism is an idealogy I find distasteful. But the violent wedges of both ideologies are not really indicative of them (which I must emphasise, are disagreeable in other ways). Anarchist terror, like Islamist terror, used the shimmer of an intellectual cover for its crimes ('propaganda of the dead'), but its practitioners seemed ultimately more motivated by, well, the same motivations of the Columbine shooters:  attention seeking self-glorification, nihilistic latent resentment and plain adoloscent boredom.

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Religious terrorism is difficult to disentangle from various other causes of course. Religion is used to shore up nationalistic movements (as in modern Burma, as in Hindutva, as in The Troubles to name some non-Islamic examples) and so in those cases nationalistic or ethnic conflicts pick up religious dimensions (see also: the Balkans). Religion is a useful complement because it gives people more of a reason to sacrifice their lives, but it's normally a useful tool of terror; rather than a motivator. Even when religion seems like the biggest issue, it's normally because of good old-fashioned cultism (which ranges from the LRA (of KONY 2012 fame) and the Japanese sarin bombers to Charles Manson's family - I.e. a a central manipulator(s) and a collection of psychological basket cases and hangers-on.

Now violent Islamism has attributes of both the cults (KONY etc) and the quasinationalism. Let's recollect what we know:

A) the Islamic revival is a relatively recent phenomona. Not that crazy stuff wasn't going on the Islamic world before, but it was usually associated with stuff like communism, or Arab nationalism. But these movements were basically discredited, and young radicals don't like to latch on something their parents support. That's lame, man.

B) the Islamic political revival seeing a gap, started to replace discredited secular movements in long stagnant conflicts - MILF replaced MILN, Hamas replaced Fatah etc (who remembers now that the Palestinian movement used to be most associated with Christian Arabs?). They also rushed into mosques (helped via healthy funding from factions of the Gulf, exerting soft power) where they swiftly became the only viable, non-discredited competition to creaky old regimes across the Muslim world.

C) these political Muslim organisations have enjoyed great success, but themselves have hit backlash due to the way they governed - I.e. although Erdoganism is distasteful, it seems to be boilerplate authoritarianism rather than a desire to create some sort of Islamist utopia. Same goes for MB, and  Ennahda etc.

D) the alternative to these mass member political movements for your young radical is terror. Terror is more cathartic an outlet than politics, so certain personality types gravitate towards that. Especially the McTerrorism of ISIS (which it should be stressed doesn't just emphasise Terror in its propaganda, otherwise the only people that would go are genuine psychotics) which has far more in common with Jimmy Jones and his Temple than anything else.

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The police, security and intelligence services are really looking incompetent as hell, even for Belgium