People who hold to your preferred cause are the only sane ones, and everyone else is &quot;merely playing politics.&quot; Cool.<p>Or maybe, just maybe, the real world is a little more complex than that. Maybe it is Islamic extremism <i>and</i> climate change <i>and</i> income inequality <i>and</i> a thousand other things all interacting with each other.<p>I don&#x27;t doubt that Piketty is using ISIS to advance his agenda, because that&#x27;s what people do. Everybody everywhere is using ISIS to advance their agenda. Piketty uses it to support his ideas about income inequality, and Sam Harris uses it to support his ideas about Islam.<p>Ultimately, pointing fingers does nothing. The question is, what do you do <i>now</i> to fix things? I don&#x27;t see anything actionable on that front coming out of the &quot;Islamic extremism&quot; cause.