This is my take on the thorny subject of the radicalization of young men in Europe and their going off to fight in the Middle East for idiotic causes like ISIS.
These views are my own. But I do have to say I haven't seen this theory expressed anywhere else amongst the reams and reams of utter bullshit I have read or the hours and hours of rationalizing drivel I have heard from so called "experts" in this area pontificating as they do, like Popes on meth.
Heck, today on National Public Radio, I swear to god some guy was talking about them being drawn to a "Utopian vision of a Perfect Caliphate". What The Flying Fuck?
No. That's not it.
That's not it at all.
Why do these young men go? ( I will address the three young girls from the UK at the end of this post )
They are drawn at least initially
for the fighting. It really is that simple. It's a "my group against your group" mentality. It is football hooliganism with a hot AK-47.
Hooliganism and this urge to fight gets deeply embedded into young men very early. Once you are loyal to a football team, you are LOYAL TO YOUR TEAM. And once put yourself into your "firm", it's "us against the rest". And before you ask "Are you equating soccer and religion?" Yes I am. There are still a couple of Catholic vs Protestant rivalries in the Football League that define their fans in just this very way, albeit not at the levels of intensity of years gone by.
Now what you have with these young men is a focused identification with their religion as that which defines their group. Hell, it defines their very identity within a Western culture in which they feel utterly adrift. And what they see, even if they are by some financial measures successful, is that members of their group do not succeed. They do not reach the pinnacles of success in their adopted countries achieved by people who they see as less than role models and less than worthy of any modicum of respect.
Basically it is the same with working class football hooligans. They band together in a group to commit violence against other people not in the group. And they aren't doing it for a cause or a Utopian ideal - they are doing it because (a) it defines them in their most important social grouping and (b) it's fun chasing down the other guy and giving him a serious seeing-to.
That's exactly what you have with these young muslim men. Their faith defines their group and they simply want to fight people not in the group. Initially at least they aren't fighting in any way for any religious ideals or beliefs or for Quranic justification. They just want to fight. Fighting is what the purposeless do because it is all they feel they can do.
And guess what? Out in the Middle East there's is a whole thing going on where you can fight and be praised for it. A heady cocktail indeed. And they get lauded and they get recognition and they get justification from their elders and they get to shoot real fucking guns.
Now, the initial reason to go maybe for the fighting, but may I suggest many actually do get a rude awakening when the rubber meets the road in Syria and the gun is finally warm in their hand?
What happens then? Then, they get purged from ISIS or El Shabab or whatever group warily took them in. They get accused of being Western spies or Zionist infiltrators. They get dead in a ditch with a hole in the back of their head and no-one to say "I told you so". And only the most hardened will remain to fight another day - monsters like Jihadi John and his motley band of Brits - trapped in a deadly shithole of their own choosing until the drone that they will never hear coming, kills them.
We do hear frightening numbers about how many have gone to fight. I wonder how many are left a month after getting to place they so mistakenly thought would see them as brothers. I believe many don't live to see the error of their travel decisions. Probably many cannot convince the groups they so want to join that they are true believers. Which when you think about it, they initially aren't. They aren't upon arrival True Believers. At first they are there for the fighting. That is what they've shown up for. Later they may get to have the threads of Islamic justification draped over them and their murderous actions.
Given all the above, what can be done to stop this idiotic desire to fight?
That is a hard question. Only time will break a religion's hold. Education won't. As we see from hearing about the universities and colleges attended by people like Jihadi John. You have to break the link to the group that these young men are so self-identifying with.
And time is all that works. That is why there is no Protestant Crusader group channeling young men to Middle Eastern Christian militias. Those would-be recruits have no association with a "Mother Church" as their defining social group. In fact, they have their footie teams for that. And their fighting goes on within that restricted arena.
Infiltrating Islamist Groups sounds like it could help, but once the rat is found in the pack, that will only ever reinforce the "us against them" mentality of would-be jihadists.
Only time and making religion a smaller and smaller part of these young men's lives can save us.
And time takes time to achieve its erosive goals.
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And briefly to address the UK schoolgirl issue....
Yes, I realize that my whole fighting-thesis does not apply. But two things do:-
1. As an article I read only today states, these girls are dazzled by these guys on social media. They are groomed within a religiously twisted framework to see these young men as admirable and worthy. If fact, worthy of marriage. The jarring reality of the life of a cheap camp follower is what awaits them. Many will never survive the shames that will be heaped upon them. A few of these young men may come back to the West, radicalized and ready to commit acts of unspeakable barbarity, but none of these girls will come back. They are lost to us and to their families. Swallowed by a glamour surrounding a blackest despair.
2. The alpha-males ( or those who see themselves as that ), always attract women. Why? I don't know. It is how the world spins. Alas, even in an organization involving the propagation of manifest evil, some naive young girls will only see the gleam in a killer's eye and not the knife he holds that puts it there.
