Submitted by Charles Knighton
Mr. Matthew Farley cites the alienation of youth (February 22 Sunday Sun) as the major factor in the decision of so many to flock to the ranks of ISIS, and I am sure such feelings of alienation play a part. But alienation in itself does not explain the well documented phenomenon of the rise in recruitment following the posting on social media of every act of barbarity committed by ISIS.
ISIS jihadis boast online of enslaving Christian and Yazidi women. Others decapitate “infidels” and celebrate with tweets of themselves holding up severed heads. Such gleeful savagery is not purely the product of alienation or religious fanaticism.
Western intelligence experts say ISIS appears to be attracting mentally ill young men who thrill at the idea of rampaging across Middle Eastern lands like a vast gang of psychopaths, raping women and killing people for pleasure. ISIS’s Western recruits are mostly men in their late teens and early 20s—the age group of most mass murderers and gang members, and the years in which mental illness is often first observed in males.
For young men who have failed to fit into society in Great Britain, the U.S. or other Western countries, Islam may be just a vehicle for nihilistic rage. Joining the “brothers” on the front lines of jihad provides exactly what they’ve been missing most: revenge on the world that rejected them, along with a sense of greater purpose and meaning. ISIS is so deranged, in fact, that its taste for blood even alarms other Islamic terrorists.
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