Trading Cricket for Jihad

Very insightful article by David Brooks

Trading Cricket for Jihad - New York Times: "The jihadists are modern psychologically as well as demographically because they are self-made men (in traditional societies there are no self-made men). Rather than deferring to custom, many of them have rebelled against local authority figures, rejecting their parents' bourgeois striving and moderate versions of Islam, and their comfortable lives.They have sought instead some utopian cause to give them an identity and their lives meaning. They find that cause in a brand of Salafism that is not traditional Islam but a modern fantasy version of it, an invented tradition. They give up cricket and medical school and take up jihad.In other words, the conflict between the jihadists and the West is a conflict within the modern, globalized world. The extremists are the sort of utopian rebels modern societies have long produced.In his book 'Globalized Islam,' the French scholar Olivier Roy points out that today's jihadists have a lot in common with the left-wing extremists of the 1930's and 1960's. Ideologically, Islamic neofundamentalism occupies the same militant space that was once occupied by Marxism. It draws the same sorts of recruits (educated second-generation immigrants, for example), uses some of the same symbols and vilifies some of the same enemies (imperialism and capitalism)."

I came across a cartoon here in which you can see a Mullah playing on Silly Mid-Off in the backyard. LOL

Update Aug 5,2005

Nicholson gave me permisssion to use his cartoon here. Thanks! He has some really funny cartoons.

That is fine. Actually the Mullah is just a garden gnome .....
but if people think of him as a mullah, all the better.