You might consider the effect on individuals of a profound hatred and disgust with the culture and society they were born into — especially as it strays and decays ever futher away from historical human norms. I keep thinking of a young man from California captured in Afghanistan years ago (right after the overthrow of the Taliban) who had converted and was working for the terrorists. Turned out his father had divorced his mother when he was a teenager and then come out as “gay”. I can understand that person’s attraction to Islam and how he might end up becoming an extremist, thinking he was fighting against all the Western social forces that had destroyed his family and any possibility pf self-respect. Of course he overlooked the possibility that just because things were bad on one side of a fight they might be still worse on the other.
