~20 minutes (Hitchens was often engaged with many people on the ground in the places about which he speaks, and while there’s some anti-establishment, post-Trotskyite hyperbole at the beginning, he gets rolling).
Found in some quarters of Europe: The desire for cheap labor + lower birth rates + more stratified, ethnically based societies + larger Welfare States and slower growth economies + Muslim immigrants often living as ‘European-Muslims’ in poorer enclaves + continued conflicts between the post-Enlightenment West and Islam over a longer period of time.
These factors and more = a population of radicalizing home-growns, unifying with various groups across the Muslim world, in both ideology and practice. In this case, with IS and its operational theater.
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There don’t seem to be many immediate plans to question the ideals around which many Europeans are uniting, nor the basic apparent failures of the political leadership to address these problems.
Reasonable people can conclude: A more practical balance of security/freedoms, political courage, and more competent management of the realities of Muslim conflict, economic migration and social integration is not forthcoming.
What’s the plan, here?
Even the NY Times noted that Western fighters heeding the jihadi call into Syria pose a risk upon return.
All that righteousness, criminality and fighting experience with nowhere to go.
Michael Moynihan jihad.com.
Repost: Kenan Malik In The Spiked Review Of Books: ‘Twenty Years On: Internalizing The Fatwa’-Salman Rushdie’Paul Berman At The New Republic: ‘From September 11 to the Arab Spring: Do Ideas Matter?’…From Foreign Affairs: ‘Al Qaeda After Attiyya’….From The AP: ‘Al-Awlaki: From Voice For Jihad To Al-Qaida Figure’From Slate: ‘In Aleppo, Syria, Mohamed Atta Thought He Could Build The Ideal Islamic City’…From The NY Times: Review Of Christopher Caldwell’s Book “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West”And: Philip Bobbitt Discusses His Book ‘Terror And Consent’ On Bloggingheads