The BBC’s Matt Frei tries to peer into the minds of wealthy, privileged men who turn to mass murder:
(Part) of the answer may lie in the fact that al-Qaeda offers something that the home environment of its recruits has failed to provide: a cause, however questionable, and even more importantly a sense of belonging.
A friend of mine in British intelligence called it “an alternative family”.
He was talking about the small number of British citizens of Pakistani origin who took part in the 7/7 attacks in London in 2005 or planning future attacks.
“They have been caressed by Britain but not embraced by it.
“They feel like misfits here in the UK. And when they return to the tribal culture of their ancestral villages in Pakistan they feel equally unwelcome. They have become nomads and al-Quaeda offers them a tent and a cause.”
Michael Chertoff, the former head of Homeland Security under George Bush wasn’t at all surprised when I spoke to him about the connection between higher education and terrorism.
“What these people find attractive is that al-Qaeda offers them a coherent world view, an ideology.”
Lots of young people, especially those raised in privilege, come in time to question the materialism of the modern world.
Most of them decline to immolate themselves in company.
“al-Quaeda offers them a tent and a cause.”
Which we aim to exchange for a box and a hole as quickly as possible.
The author fails to mention what I believe is driving most of this. The homogeneity of religious beliefs. Although there are enclaves of non-islamic believers, these small groups are isolated and persecuted. The vagaries of youth are not limited to the West. And so, while floundering about in search of direction, there is Jihad. The restless are easily mislead. The spiritual as ultimate motivator. The Jihadists are still comfortably ensconsed inside the Islamic faith. The moderate Islamists don’t rise up en masse and throw them out of the faith, so they are legitimized in the eyes of troubled youth. If the radicals found themselves universally denounced and thrown out of the Islamic tent into the sandy wasteland with the other apostates, Jihad wouldn’t be nearly as an attractive pursuit for the misguided youth. As long as all are in the tent, this won’t stop.
I have no idea what happened on that comment, but obviously my HTML skilz is lacking. Well at least both links are still in there. I’m off to HTML for dummies class.
I would question their status as highly educated, particularly if they are recent university students. What they get is a PC morass masquerading as education. Most liberal arts education these days is just nihilism on stilts.
Well, I think there’s a kernel of truth in there. The multi-cultural, PC’ishness of the modern west is profoundly disenchanting and disappointing. There’s a fine line to walk in an open, pluralistic society between an overbearing sense of xenophobic nationalism and too many Sorelian myths that disconnect a people from reality and make them think they’re something they’re not (i.e. Italians under Mussolini believing they could and would revive the Roman Empire) in an effort to forge a coherent nation on the one hand, and an identity politics driven, rejection of nationalism, rejection of all appreciation for your country or a sense of it having a greater purpose in the world than the sum of its individual inhabitants on the other in a completely libertine “anything goes” cultural milieu. OK, actually I don’t think it’s all that fine a line at all, but our modern cultural zeitgeist is entirely on the left side of that spectrum and completely unbalanced, with the result that social fragmentation along religious and ethnic lines, disillusionment with the generally deconstructed and dishonored national history and purpose, and lack of any national unity and strength are all completely inevitable and unsurprising. Al-Qaeda, people who are more connected to the Hobbesian reality of man’s nature, are simply picking up on this and exploiting it.
The West needs to re-discover its unique past and be proud of it, an on balance great civilization that has taken us out of the dark state of man alone in nature and is worth defending, preserving, improving and promoting. Move the pendulum back towards the middle and make westerners feel like they’re part of a civilization that’s actually heading somewhere more soul satisfying than a feminized nanny-state that succors your every need for you in a financially unsustainable way and that culturally is almost without exception leading to below replacement birth rates and thus decline in every sense of the word.
The only good IMF is a dead IMF
rejection of all appreciation for your country or a sense of it having a greater purpose in the world than the sum of its individual inhabitants on the other in a completely libertine “anything goes” cultural milieu.
Hm. I do believe that the more radical left sees no strong appreciation for their country. To them the sins of the United States – and there have been not a few – outweigh the great things it has done. The most radical figure that any good that was done was a byproduct of what certain groups thought was the best way to maintain their supposed dominance over American society, as opposed to having been done to fufill American ideals.
But rather than being concerned about individuals they are more concerned to put people into groups and then try to use government to create a society where people are protected to a certain extent from their own bad choices. That’s justified on the basis that people in highly-favored groups have “privilege”. They can make choices. People in less-favored groups do not have “privilege”, do not have control over their own lives and don’t have choices – i.e., they are forced into what they do. Individuals don’t count for much, the group – groups of their choosing, always based on race, income or sex but not on country or voluntary criteria – is all.
Another good article plumbing the depths of this subj. is to be found at PJ media by Jamie Glazov entitled: “The Islamic Roots of Abdulmutallab’s Suicidal Odyssey.” @
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-islamic-roots-of-abdulmutallabs-suicidal-odessey/