I propose that jihadists come from one of 2 backgrounds: 1.) the culturally attacked. No one in the west wants to admit this, but Bin Laden was very clear about his internal logic for the 9/11 attacks. He wrote about it and spoke about it at length. Americans had been occupying his home country for years. He had seen sacred spaces desecrated, and was powerless to do anything about it, so he resorted to the one form of power he could find. He became a wildly lashing out animal. When we go into a land and kill indiscriminately, we can not be surprised when the children of those we kill vow their lives to killing as many of the people who killed their parents as possible. Religion is only an excuse, for what is really a cultural issue. I know a number of Jews, many of them atheists, and those who aren’t are hardly dedicated to their faith. Yet all of them see the Nazi regime as an attack against them, and rightly so. Likewise, when we kill thousands upon thousands of muslims, we must accept at least partial responsibility for those who then take it upon themselves to strike back however they can. 1.) the wannabe: I remember reading a while back that a large number of LA gang members were second generation Americans. That is to say, many of them grew up in Spanish speaking homes, and were neither Mexican, nor did they fit into the wasp American communities which they were taught to aspire to. Lacking any sense of roots, they tried to find their own community, and prove their own power and manliness via the most crude means. I read that the brothers in Paris were not especially religious in their youth, but “found” religion and immediately went to the jihad. Given the cultural divide of muslim and non-muslims in France, I can imagine a young man seeing a place to find roots, despite the fact that they may be completely fake, and to prove his manhood by engaging in a battle for “his people” I signed up for the army slightly after 9/11. I promise you, this idea is not lost on the youth of America, or unique to those of minority birth. The underlying issue, then, is not so much the faith as such, but the cultural identity it allows one to gain, and the sense of place it promotes. A faith, then may be a tool to try to use this for good, but in so much as the “good” we know is quite often “meekness” this conflicts greatly with the young hoodlums desire to “prove themselves” and as such will be rejected in favor of violent doctrine.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 07:01:22 +0000
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