{"id":72931,"date":"2015-07-20T06:59:28","date_gmt":"2015-07-20T06:59:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/?page_id=72931"},"modified":"2015-07-20T19:11:43","modified_gmt":"2015-07-20T19:11:43","slug":"suburban-teenage-jihadists","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/?page_id=72931","title":{"rendered":"Suburban teenage jihadists!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Teenage jihadists in your suburban home!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Begin with two key (and obvious) facts: the median age in the Muslim world is around 25, and young people have always been assigned the role of ground-level fighters by all nations and organizations, officially sanctioned or otherwise, throughout history. So, it is no more shocking that fighters for the violent Islamic State (ISIS) jihadists in Syria and Iraq would be \u201cyoung people\u201d than for any other enterprise.<\/p>\n

Yet, The New Yorker<\/em>, MSNBC<\/em>, President Obama, and other mainstream and liberal\/Left voices act as if the vanishingly tiny number of Muslim teenagers and young adults living in the United States and Western Europe who have joined, or attempted to join, ISIS, are just typical suburban kids. In the words of a former FBI agent quoted fawningly in the New Yorker<\/a><\/em>: \u201cYoung people see videos on YouTube, they see speeches and sermons, they get really emotional\u2026 They don\u2019t think, Is this a legitimate narrative, a legitimate religion? They don\u2019t think about whether it\u2019s the right thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cISIS’s message is increasingly resonant with Western youth\u201d with a social-media \u201cmessage that is proving romantic, heroic and alluring,\u201d the Department of Homeland Security<\/a> warned, without presenting evidence of increased allure. Law enforcement, “communities and families (have) to be on the lookout and to be vigilant about the potential that their youth are being drawn like the Pied Piper to this movement in the Middle East,\u201d breathed CBS News<\/em> Senior National Security Analyst Juan Zarate<\/a>. \u201cThey (teenagers) are really romantic,\u201d an MSNBC commentator scoffed.<\/p>\n

Naturally, President Obama, who never misses a chance to trash teenagers (and grab worshipful press accolades), described the fight against ISIS recruiting of \u201cyoung people\u201d as a \u201cgenerational challenge<\/a>\u201d in which shocked and wise older folks \u2013 law enforcement, parents, educators, religious leaders, government \u2013 must band together to straighten out the hordes of starry-eyed little bomb-tossing, gunfire-spraying, ax-swinging\u00a0terrorist wannabes.<\/p>\n

So, given that being unthinkingly seduced by social media into emotionally running off to Iraq to join militant jihadists is some kind of natural \u201cteenage\u201d behavior cops and parents in every community should be worried about, how many hundreds of thousands or millions of U.S. youth have actually done so? The DHS estimates a whopping total of 18 U.S. citizens<\/a> who \u201ctend to be between the ages 18 and 29\u201d actually have joined ISIS.<\/p>\n

Assume, arbitrarily, it\u2019s 10 times that many. There are 60 million 18-29 year-olds in the United States. And, in a demographic nuance commentators seem unable to grasp, most 18-29 year-olds are not \u201cteenagers,\u201d let alone high schoolers. Or that, anecdotes aside, most terrorists, from Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Kansas abortion-doctor assassin Scott Roeder to Osama bin Laden and the Charlie Hebdo attackers<\/a>, are long past teen ages.<\/p>\n

What about European teenagers, accused even more vehemently of romanticizing ISIS? A Russian news agency poll<\/a> found very mixed results. ISIS support was strongest in France (16%) among all ages but particularly among the young (27%); weaker in the U.K. (7%), with considerably more support for ISIS<\/a> among older people (11%) than younger ones (4%); and even weaker in Germany (2%), with little difference by age. Unlike the primitive U.S.\u00a0teens-are-stupid commentaries, French analysts noted the contexts of support for ISIS: the 40% unemployment rate among young Muslims, traditional resentment of France\u2019s colonial atrocities in North Africa, and a reaction against anti-Muslim intolerance<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Overlooked in yet another round of American teen-bashing is the shocking reality of the original funders of ISIS<\/a>, who decidedly are NOT young people: \u201cgovernment or private sources in the oil-rich nations of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait\u2014and a large network of private donors, including Persian Gulf royalty, businessmen and wealthy families.\u201d There\u2019s the real, impolitic story of the U.S.\u2019s strongest allies in the region funding ISIS that has gone completely overlooked as American officialdom and media raise panics that \u201cyour teen\u201d will suddenly dash off to slaughter for the caliphate.<\/p>\n

Why do progressives join in such moronic anti-youth clamor? After all, mainstream liberals and the Left are vocal in rejecting right-wing scapegoating of Muslims for terrorism. To briefly review the logic:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. While ISIS is Muslim in the same sense that the Klan is white, only a tiny fraction of Muslims join or support violent terrorism just as very few whites join the Klan.<\/li>\n
  2. Terrorist organizations exist for groups other than Muslims (i.e., the Klan and whites).<\/li>\n
  3. Imposing collective guilt on (and assigning collective traits to) an entire group for the actions of a tiny fraction of the group\u2019s number is crude bigotry.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Seems simple, right? Introduction to Modern Thinking 1. Why, then, do progressives abandon their anti-bigotry ideals when it comes to accusing teenagers of being natural-born terrorists? Is it just because they can? (Mike Males, 7\/20\/2015)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Teenage jihadists in your suburban home! Begin with two key (and obvious) facts: the median age in the Muslim world is around 25, and young people have always been assigned the role of ground-level fighters by all nations and organizations, officially sanctioned or otherwise, throughout history. So, it is no more shocking that fighters for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/full-width.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-72931","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/72931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72931"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/72931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73198,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/72931\/revisions\/73198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}