The real angry young men

IN the wake of World War II, despite the fact that Britain eventually enjoyed the rebounding prosperity that saw the birth of Swinging London, there was great excitement about the phenomenom of "angry young men." Of course, what the "angry young men" really boiled down to was a handful of writers struggling, for whatever personal reasons, to come to terms with a changing post-war society. We're now facing a different group of angry young men, with much more dangerous conseequences to us all than just boring, polemical plays and novels that one is forced to read in high school. R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. writes a fascinating column that looks at all the stuff we already know (this is a manufactured crisis, there's no Koranical prohibition against images of the Prophet, Mohammed can be the subject of a joke, etc.) and asks a different question: who are the people doing the leg work for the truly evil mullahs? It's obvious just turning on the TV that they are angry young men, but why are they so angry, and where do they come from? His answer:

The Islamicist agitators have two sources of power: the lone terrorist willing to blow himself up, and the mob of young men willing to riot. It is these two instrumentalities that the Islamicist leaders rely on to acquire influence and power. These two instrumentalities are alarming, but take heart. They are also the conditions of a decadent, dysfunctional culture. Death and destruction do not create civilizations or prosperous societies or even a conquering army. Frankly, though I am no theologian, I doubt they can create heaven on earth. They are the death rattle of a dead culture. Why so many of the countries dominated by Islam are in such a heap is a good question. Economists claim that it is because Islam does not encourage entrepreneurship. Neoconservatives argue that these countries have been denied democracy because of the rule of tyrants. And there are sociologists who perceive a deeper cause, the ancient patriarchy of these countries. In places such as Syria, which is mostly Arab, and Iran, which is not, old men rule their families and their clans. They keep women and girls in the background. They keep young men in inferior status, despite the young men's talents and energies. The consequence is a lot of angry, frustrated young men. Such young men are available for riot at the drop of a...well, at the drop of a cartoon. Whether the economists are right in their analysis or the Neocons or the sociologists, or any other gogues that might offer up an analysis, one thing is eminently clear. The peoples in such a rage over Danish cartoonists are a deeply troubled people. They are incapable of reason or even of governing themselves. They are the enemy of civilization, whether it be Western civilization or some civilized order that might emerge in the Middle East. I hope the Europeans who have been so critical of our military action in Iraq and Afghanistan take note. The Islamofascists are as great a danger as was Hitler, who left Europe in the kind of desolate chaos that the Islamofascists adumbrate.

He's right, of course, in his last conclusion about these men -- while they cannot create a viable society, because anger and necrophilia are not building tools, they have the capability to create the type of chaos that will bury us all. Talking to Technorati: Islam, Muslims, Moslems, Riots, Cartoon riots, Angry young men