I am thinking here of the recent growth of anti-Muslim attitudes expressed by politicians and local leaders in response to Americans of the Islamic faith seeking to build a new mosque or community center, whether it be in Tennessee, California, or two blocks from Ground Zero in a multi-faith neighborhood that openly and proudly supports the presence of Americans of Muslim faith in their midst.

Not a shred of evidence exists to back up the assertions of these opponents of religious freedom who tar all Muslims with the stink of terrorism. Our police and intelligence services worry about this spreading attitude because it makes their jobs much more difficult and also risks embittering citizens previously free to pursue like every other American life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness who just happen to be Muslim.

As leftists sow social discord and problems with their race preference agenda, so too now are certain elements of the Right who seem to seek to promote AQ’s propaganda about the USA by making it truth instead of fiction.

In the past fifty years, adolescents have joined a host of marginalized groups their parents found dangerous – juvenile delinquents, mods and rockers, punks, skinheads, and Goths. So why not jihadis? Islamist terror certainly scares authority figures; why wouldn’t Western adolescents and misfits be attracted to violent Islamism — at least as a symbolic stance?
[...]
Most of us think that Islamic terror is just too serious to be trivialized into a pose for disaffected Western youth. But we may have underrated the effects of a decade of political correctness and anti-Americanism in popular culture, where the search for transgressive shock value never ends.

Take M.I.A.’s new album. It lacks much of the raw energy and boogey rhythm that enlivened her first two albums, so transgression is pretty much all she has to fall back on. And transgress she does. One cut, “Illygirl,” manages to rhyme (and identify the singer with) three cultural lodestars – her “tight jeans,” “Bruce Springsteen,” and the “muhahedin”. For M.I.A., in other words, Islamic terrorism is already a kind of life-style fashion item, a marginalized-and-proud, third-world stance that can be easily worn to parties in Brentwood by a wealthy former British art student. And if it works for M.I.A., why shouldn’t it work for an immigrant kid in New Jersey?

The articel goes on to suggest a way to counter this.

[1]
http://volokh.com/2010/07/24/will-jihad-jump-the-shark/

A brief overview of Iranian history would point to the attraction of the movements to college students. And as I’ve written many times, Al-Qaeda style terrorism is exactly the sort of thing that alienated young males love.

I think that tracking Al-Qaedist sympathies in colleges is something I’m going to have to do some more research on. Certainly bin Laden’s quotations of Chomsky have met with approval.

I wasn't alive during the Vietnam War and haven't read all that much on it, so I can't comment on that aspect. But the notion that it would ever be fashionable to support al-Qaeda related movements on college campuses is laughable. You're off your rocker – perhaps your disgust of the “Left” is blinding you to some fundamental realities.

What do college-age kids like? SEX. What does al-Qaeda fear? SEX. Ditto for drugs. And not very many people become MORE religious as they attend college. I'd believe that you meant this comment sarcastically, but you made it its own paragraph so I guess you really meant it…?

What do college-age kids like? SEX. What does al-Qaeda fear? SEX. Ditto for drugs. “

Yet Communist tyrants, from Ceausescu to Mao, instituted sexually conservative regimes and harshly prosecuted drug offenders. This did not stop Communism from being fashionable enough on college campuses to imperial the physical security of ROTCs, etc.

“And not very many people become MORE religious as they attend college. “

It's cliche to say that college is when many young people, with a sudden increase in freedom with very little increased responsibility, start looking beyond themselves… All sorts of utopian and millennial activism happens in colleges (GreenPeace, Amnesty International, etc.). In the absence of a grand strategic program to rebel against, student troublemaking is relatively harmless. When given a noble goal to spit upon, however, colleges have proven to be very dangerous.

(There is a reason that most state universities were placed in small towns..)