Children are the future of a nation.
Usually, when people use that phrase, it’s one of two ways. If offered with a wistful optimism, it is because one day the young, idealistic lads and lasses we see around us will grow up and take the baton from the hands of the generation before them, shouldering the responsibility of leading the nation in business, government, culture and all the rest.
Sometimes, it is offered with bitter cynicism. What?? We’re handing the wheel over to THESE people (easily forgetting that our parents’ generation shared the same reaction).
Normally, however, it isn’t said with any sense of stark terror. We haven’t really been concerned on any deep level that we might be handing that baton over to the “Children of the Corn”. Maybe that’s only because we do not live in Belgium.
In the last year, there have been a few… let’s call them “disturbances”… in Europe. The phrase Allahu Akbar might or might not have been uttered, not that that’s relevant at all, obviously. There was a little dust-up in Paris, and some minor disturbance briefly disrupting air traffic through Belgium.
It occurred to someone to talk to the teachers in some of the communities whose names we learned during such events, places like Molenbeek and Schaerbeek. In the predominantly Muslim communities there, somewhere around 90% of the 17 and 18 year old students have offered their thoughts on the attacks on Paris and Brussels.
They considered the attacks to be the work of “heroes.”
This, dear reader, is the graduating class of this year and next. The young bucks and lasses of college and career (and military) age, at the prime of their lives where they are at their most idealistic, when they are most driven to support a cause. But the cause that has captured their imagination, where they find their heroes? Violent Jihad.
That number again was 90 Percent. Ninety. This is not the Moderate Islam we were told to expect among those peaceful migrants who were seeking a better life. (Side question, how many from this same stock have journeyed further West across the Atlantic, bringing this attitude with them?)
Government officials have this matter well in hand, as you might imagine. They have done away with the obviously incorrect motivations, and have, instead, zeroed in on the real problem.
They know that the real problem has nothing to do with the name that is uttered during all these attacks. That’s just a red herring. Don’t be Islamophobic, you hater. The terrorists, you see, “believe in nothing”.
So, what is the real problem?
The experts have got that all worked out. These teens have been culturally isolated, you see. Stunted, even. Here’s a politician’s quote that sums their position up nicely:
“We have neighborhoods where people only see the same people, go to school with the same people. What connection do they have with the whole society, what connection do they have with real diversity? It’s the establishment of the ghetto,” he says, “and it’s the thing in our urban development that we have to tackle.”
“These young people will never go to museums until 18 or 20 — they never saw Chagall, they never saw Dalí, they never saw Warhol, they don’t know what it is to dream.”
There you have it. More Warhol will produce less bombings. Who knew the solution could be found in a painted can of soup?
Of course, the obvious reply offered by Breitbart was this; if true, this raises two other questions, which, paraphrased, are as follows.
Why do similarly insulated ethnic communities (think Chinatown, for example) not have equivalent expressions of violence in their midst?
Also, if we mustn’t blame Islam, what variable accounts for the global nature of violence so often attended by the phrase “allahu akbar”?
