The Age of Anxiety

Peter King be damned! The reason Muslims become "radicalized," insists the Canadian Islamic Congress's Ahmed Shoker writing in the outfit's Friday Magazine, is because the West propped up crappy Muslim regimes in the Middle East, thereby engendering a great deal of Muslim "anxiety."

That's right. The jihad imperative and the example of Islam's founder have little to do with "extremism"--and don't let "Islamophobic" right-wingers tell you otherwise. That's why, writes Shoker, King-like inquiries are not the way to go. Instead, he says,

We need to build a better understanding of “radicalization,” seeing it not as aberrant behavior that automatically spells terrorism, but as a symptomatic stress-response to chronic conditions of  deprivation and absence of basic human rights.

If that's the case, we could "solve" the jihad problem by urging the stressed out to take up yoga and Pilates and, should that fail, via heavy-duty doses of Valium.