In a characteristically brilliant essay, this one shorter than usual, Theodore Dalrymple – one of the finest writers and thinkers in the anglosphere – defines the rise of radical Islam as the Marxism of our time in the manner it attracts (so far largely European) youth.
Best news of all for the Islamists, however, comes from Germany. Two of the men that the German police arrested in early September for plotting a series of huge explosions in the country were young German converts to Islam. It is impossible to know how many such German converts there are, but it is thought to run into tens of thousands, principally men; in the nature of things, it is also uncertain how many of them are attracted to extremism, but few people are so attracted by moderation that they are converted by it.
The man believed to be the leader of the little group, Fritz G., the son of a doctor and an engineer, was himself a student of engineering, of mediocre attainment. He grew up in Ulm, where a quarter of the population is now Muslim, and at the time of his parents’ divorce, when he was 15, he began to frequent the Islamic Information Center of Ulm, and also the comically named Multikultihaus in the neighboring town of Neu-Ulm, where young men of jihadist views, including Mohammed Atta, had long congregated. In 2004, he was spotted at the Ulm Islamic center, selling a journal called Think in the Islamic Way. In December of that year, the police found propaganda in favor of Osama bin Laden in his car. In 2006, he went to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.
You should read it all, of course, but what Dalrymple omits, although others have observed it, makes Islamism even more dangerous than Marxism. All Marx, the atheist, ever promised was economic equality (and maybe a little less alienation). How piddling is that compared to eternal bliss in Heaven under Allah.
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