Frank Furedi wrote the best book on World War I that I know and has now bought in on our most recent episode of attempted terror. Having been part of a generation that had the same sense of alienation that he uses here to explain, I am somewhat sympathetic to this assessment. But my own conclusions from my days on the très-très bored left of my student “rebellion” has left me with the firm conviction that the only way to deal with such people – the kind of people that I was myself – is to provide no leniency of any kind. Do you want to protest? Fine, but you should also understand there are real risks to your life and future. Not that we are here dealing with the kind of larks we were on protesting in front of the American embassy or whatever. These people are violent criminals, and while we can try to understand them, there should be not an ounce of tolerance for any of this. This is from his article in today’s Oz, Youth rebellion that embraces authority:

In Australia and elsewhere the attraction of radical Islamist ideology is preceded by a rejection of society’s Western culture. Many young people who find it difficult to gain meaning from their lives in their wider community life react by rejecting it. Their Muslim peers sometimes go a step further and express their alienation through the medium of a jihadist outlook. The appeal of this is that it provides a coherent and edgy identity. It offers the cultural resources for the constitution of a distinct Islamic youth subculture.

Radical young Muslims self-consciously distance themselves from the moral and social conventions of a society they claim to loathe. However, their rebellion against the way of life of their community is coupled with a rejection of the customs and behaviour of their elders and family members.

Invariably such a response bears the hallmark of a generational reaction against the behaviour and way of life of the parents. That reaction is also directed ­towards the way their elders express their cultural and religious identity. One manifestation of this reaction against the conventions of their elders is the adoption of the outward markings of an in-your-face Islamists cultural iden­tity. That is why young Australian Muslims are likely to be more religious and anti-Western than their parents. They are likelier to sport a beard as symbol of piety, wear the veil or go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. They are likelier to perceive the West as a threat to Islam.

Well as long as they understand in return that we now see Islam as a threat to the West then they will understand where we are now at. This is a two-way street. No one attacks them first in any part of the world so what they think of as “attacks” are complaints along the lines of “I hit him when he hit me back”. Whatever they may feel about the glories of their own way of life, no one can see it from the outside looking from our own worldview in our very sweet, kind and gentle westernised communities.