David Brooks, OpEd

Re: Today's NY Times OpEd ~ by David Brooks

"Trading Cricket for Jihad"

We are citing this OpEd by Brooks for 3 reasons:
{1} It echoes my Posting, "Britain, beware!"
{2} I predict it will elicit only 3 or 4 letters to the editor and that each of those letters will take a negative anti-Bush tack.
{3} Take heed to the very ominous threat issued today by Al Qaeda: Military attacks on Britain and America are imminent.

What follows is an attributed rephrasing of his column:

David Brooks points out that according to recent analyses, about 75% of the anti-Western terrorists are well educated and that they come from middle or upper class families and homes. Many of them have already rebelled against their families and their countries of origin and yet they are reluctant to sink roots into the regions where they now reside.

Humiliated by the backwardness of the countries they came from, they eagerly seek Utopian causes to give them and their lives identity and meaning. Extremist Islamic teachings like Salafism help to reinforce in their minds that the fundamental conflict between the jihadists and the West is economic as well as religious. Marxism once expressed similar theses. Globalization is a concept that frightens Islam.

Brooks believes that the Arab world is prone to adopt ideas that the West has discarded. Indeed, one basic jihadist weakness is that it has no meaningful or viable input from the Arab or Muslim world. Terrorism, he says, is also an immigration problem. Migrating Muslims are disinclined to root themselves into the cultures of the countries they have fled to. Countries with large migrant populations should begin to make much greater efforts to assimilate their Muslim arrivals.

David Brooks can be counted upon to write seminal columns ~DG