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One Young Man's Concern on Extremism By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI

"The evil programs on TV, the music, the literature, the magazines ... are all responsible for the terrorist attacks. People are becoming rebellious because they are against fornication, gambling, alcohol," Fazel said.

"Until they get rid of Eminem and Marilyn Manson, they can't get rid of our preachers," he added.

Fazel called himself a former "kafar," Arabic for an infidel who did not fear God, and said he once enjoyed drinking with his friends and the company of young women.

Then, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, he read about al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden.

Images of the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsing, he said, fueled his curiosity about the faith of his ancestors.

"Allah pointed me to him (bin Laden)," said Fazel, dressed in a white shalwar kameez, the traditional loose tunic-and-trouser common to men in South Asia.

Three years later, he said, an angel spoke to him.

"I needed change. Drugs and alcohol did me no good," he said.

The young man denied that he was confused about his faith and asserted just as vehemently that he did not "give a damn about the world."

Fazel said he has not told his parents about turning to his deepest Islamic roots. Like many of his peers who also were born of immigrant Muslim parents, Fazel has found difficulty integrating into British society and expresses a sense of displacement and alienation.

And then, via Donald SensingThe Truth About Jihad By Max Rodenbeck:

In Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, Olivier Roy, one of France's leading scholars of modern Islamism, notes striking parallels between today's jihadists and Europe's radical left of the 1960s and 1970s. The two movements have drawn from similar social pools of alienated, dislocated youth. They have chosen similar symbols (beards and guns and sanctified texts: the Koran substituting for Marx, Sayed Qutb, the Egyptian whose theories inspired the Muslim Brotherhood, for Gramsci) and targets ("imperialism," "globalization," "Americanization"). The jihadists' notion of a pan-Islamic Ummah, or nation, says Roy, recalls the Trotskyists' idea of the proletariat: "an imaginary and therefore silent community that gives legitimacy to the small groups pretending to speak in its name." The triumph of Islam is held to be, as the triumph of socialism once was, "inevitable."