Daily Times

Last week’s highly publicised White House summit on countering violent extremism provoked greatest criticism on two points. First, President Barack Obama was roundly attacked for not using any variant of the words Islam or Muslim in describing the extremist threats. The White House responded that the president did not wish to offend the Muslim community with what could be misperceived as incendiary language, stressing that the US was not waging a “war on Islam”. Second, the argument that poverty was a fundamental factor in the conversion to violent extremism was likewise dismissed on the grounds that many younger converts come from middle or even upper class homes and can be described as “Muslim millennials”.

Unfortunately, the current rationale to explain why substantial numbers of young Muslims have heeded this siren-like call to jihad is incomplete. Why has the appeal of this violent, repugnant and medieval perversion of Islam seduced certain millennials? One answer could be raging hormones and confused sexuality after the onset of puberty. Consider several pieces of evidence for this hypothesis. Last weekend, television network news flashed airport images of three teen-aged British Muslim girls who, without warning or notice, left home to board a flight to Istanbul presumed to be en route to join Islamist fighters in Syria. Why or how did this happen?

Here are two possible answers. A Canadian teenaged Muslim girl, reportedly, was recruited by an IS extremist exploiting her repressed sexuality. The girl wanted to have sexual relations but was prevented by the mores of her religion and the promise of hell if she transgressed. The recruiter convinced her that under sharia law sex with jihadists was perfectly legitimate. And, by joining the jihad, heaven — not hell — awaited her.

The New York Times posted a brilliant video documenting a young Egyptian bodybuilder’s conversion to Islamist radicalism and his joining IS in Syria. At one stage, Islam Yaken, his nom d’guerre (pseudonym), was solely interested in dating “hot chicks” and becoming an athletic trainer. However, psychological ambivalence over sexuality and the conflict with the morality of his religion led him to the internet to seek answers and relief. He came into contact with an interlocutor who preached the virtues of extreme Islam and chastity along with the role of women in sharia society in which killing of infidels and apostates was justified. According to his friends, Yaken became ultra religious, uncomfortable around women, ultimately leaving Egypt to fight with IS. From Syria, he made several videos extolling killing apostates and infidels. In one video, he is seen standing over a decapitated body.

Clearly, many factors are involved in recruiting volunteers to fight in Syria and join IS or other extremist groups. Adventure, disenfranchisement and rejection by society, along with the prospect of sizable paychecks, are part of this mixture that can become as addictive as heroin or cocaine. And the call to jihad to fight a holy war against infidels in which, to unbelievers, death is the absolute end, instead opens the pathway to eternal life in a heavenly world far more attractive than any earthly alternative.

Not all converts necessarily drink this poisonous Kool-aid. For some, power and comradeship in a revolutionary movement aimed against forces of repression and a corrupt order are empowering. In that regard, a distant kinship with the followers of Lenin and Hitler may exist. And, of course, as Lenin turned Russia into the Soviet Union in 1917 and Hitler turned Germany into Nazi Germany in 1933, perhaps the caliphate might enjoy similar success. Yet, among the young millennials who may not share similar global expectations, could raging hormones and ambivalence over sexuality be generic leverage points and weaknesses that recruiters of IS have and will exploit? If this is true, then the counter-narrative so many call for in winning the war of ideas will have to address this human weakness and the biological aspects of sexuality and puberty.

The examples noted above are anecdotal and obviously not definitive. Yet the way IS, al Qaeda and other Islamist radicals have exploited social media and the internet cannot be dismissed as pure luck. Not all revolutionaries are mad or mentally unstable, driven to irrationality by ideology.

As potentially dangerous and frightening as IS and other extremists might be, if indeed these movements are exploiting the raging hormones and sexuality of teenagers, a last data point is relevant. If one tenth of one percent of all 1.5 billion Muslims in this cohort is vulnerable to this siren-like call, that number of 1.5 million is larger than the entire US active duty military. I hope that the president’s summit at least got a few people to think along these lines.

The writer is chairman of the Killowen Group that advises leaders of government and business and senior advisor at Washington DC’s Atlantic Council. His latest book, due out this fall, is A Handful of Bullets: How the Murder of an Archduke a Century Ago Still Menaces Peace Today