The Fad...

Recently, Jessica Stern of The Boston Globe compared the recent world-wide Jihad movement with the ganster rap fad, something that appeals to young people without them giving much thought about what the movement is saying. She also states that "Jihad has become a millenarian movement such as the anarchists of the 19th century or even the peace movement of the 1960s and 70s. But today's radical youth are expressing their dissatisfaction with the status quo by making war, not peace." In order words, Stern holds that the Jihad movement is like a fashion movement to Muslim youth. It is indeed something that appeals to them because of the seemingly 'righteous' element it involves. Somewhere across the live coverage of the Qana massacre and Hezbollah dropping +190 rockets a day on Israel the reality gets lost. Dissatisfied youth always collects itself within a movement, or a fad. They declare themselves Jihadists mainly to fight a Western world the vast majority of them do not know at all. The Jihad movement is, in many ways, another form of indoctrination a la Hitler's Youth. I wonder why a Jihad organizer never volunteers himself for a suicide mission; it is always the young (often teenagers), the dissatisfied youth that they send forth to kill themselves and others. Stern also states that "[t]here's an appeal to an identity of victimhood [within the Jihad movement]: If I am a victim of someone else's bad actions, I have an excuse for not meeting expectations--my own or others'. There is an appeal to righteous indignation." The questions remains: Are Muslism young people embracing the Jihad movement out of real love for Islam, or due to a misconstructed, misleading idea of what that religion really stand for?