Also on this page "Why Are So Many Active Terrorists Young Males?"

Why "British Muslims" Attack Britons

When some young British-born Muslim men blew up over 50 of their countrymen commuting on the subway, Brits and other Westerners asked,  “How can a British-born Muslim kill his own countrymen?”

The reason is not complicated; loyalty is a matter of shared values. No shared values, no loyalty.  

The values of Islam and the values of the Enlightenment West are mutually exclusive, and can never be shared. To illustrate the value differences between the values of the West and Islam, here, in a nutshell, is a comparison of the source of their values, their philosophies: 

Our ethics: Human life is the “standard of the good.” All thoughts and behaviors that promote life as appropriate to a human being are “good,” while all thoughts and behaviors that threaten it are “bad.” 

Their ethics: The spread of Islam is the “standard of the good.” All thoughts and behaviors that promote the spread of Islam, up to and including murder and mayhem, are “good,” while all thoughts and behaviors that obstruct it are “bad.” 

Our epistemology: Knowledge is acquired through the use of reason, and requires evidence or proof.

Their epistemology: Knowledge is acquired through revelation from Allah. All the knowledge that is necessary for a human being to know has been revealed in the Koran. 

Our metaphysics: Existence – the universe – is governed by natural law, which is open to discovery through the use of reason. Because everything that exists follows the laws of nature, it is ultimately understandable by human beings. 

Their metaphysics: Existence – the universe – is governed by the whim of Allah. He controls every event and every entity at all times, and he could change anything at will, at any time, making the universe an incomprehensible, unknowable, unpredictable, uncertain place to live. The only hope for human beings is to try to guess what Allah wants and to comply with his wishes every moment of his life. 

Our politics: The rights of the individual human being are supremely important, and the only proper function of government is to protect them.  

Their politics: Totalitarianism. The protection and furtherance of Islam (the tribe, or group) is the only reason for the existence of the individual human being, and it is his moral/religious obligation to devote his life to that cause. He has no other reason to exist.

Given that the philosophical views of the Enlightenment and Islam are mutually exclusive, it is easy to understand how a British-born (or French-born, or American-born, or Spanish-born, or Dutch-born, or German-born etc. ad nauseam) Muslim will have no loyalty towards the country of his birth. His loyalty lies with Islam, not with the Enlightenment. 

So long as Islam prohibits, under threat of death, the competition of ideas it will never change. Muslims are hobbled by Islamic philosophy, and they will never be free to think.

 ~~~~~

Why Are So Many Active Terrorists Young Males?

Have you ever wondered why are so many active terrorists are young males between the ages of 15-35? 

Well, of course, we know that for one thing, Islam teaches Muslim children to hate non-Muslims, and that jihad is a religious obligation. To make matters worse, we know that Islam blames everything but its own failed philosophy for its inability to compete successfully with the rest of the world and earn its respect. 

Well, all of that is important, but it still doesn’t answer the question about why so many terrorists are young males. Why don’t terrorists come in equal numbers of young and old, male and female? Why is the overwhelming majority made up of young males? 

It’s common knowledge that androgenic hormones promote increased aggression, and that has a lot to do with it. But there’s more to it than that. 

The motive for terrorism is Islam, and we’ll address that too. Right now, though, we’ll look at the reasons for the “gender gap” and the “age gap” among terrorists. 

Even before puberty, most parents can sense that change is in the air. In the few years preceding puberty, beginning around 6-8 years, there is a gradual but noticeable increase in the production of sex hormones to prepare the body for the onset of full blown reproductive competence. Parents of blond Nordic children can see the first hints of this increase in sex hormones as their toddlers’ blond hair begins to darken a little; eventually, the baby born with pale blond peach fuzz often becomes a true brunette. In addition to darker hair, parents also begin to see an increase in what is politely called “oppositional behavior.” By the time puberty kicks in – well, every parent of adolescents knows that we’re talking about young people who can be very difficult to live with, and who can make some very bad, even life-threatening, judgment calls.  

Androgenic hormones produce certain so-called “secondary sex characteristics” such as pubic and axillary hair, scent glands, increased musculature, thicker skin, coarser hair, etc. Hormone production peaks in the twenties, levels off, then begins to decrease. The decrease begins to become particularly noticeable at around 35-40 years of age.  

But making changes in the appearance and function of the body is not all that these hormones do. For example, most of us notice that older people tend to be less emotionally volatile and less aggressive (not necessarily less assertive) than younger people. If adults, even into old age, are healthy and not otherwise unusually stressed, they generally have a pretty even temperament, are pretty friendly and polite, and have a sense that they can solve the common problems that crop up in life.  

Most people assume that this increased evenness of temperament and positive outlook come as a result of greater life experience. After all, adults have been around the block more times than adolescents and young adults, so things that send the young person into an emotional tailspin often just roll off the adult’s back. 

Life experience is certainly part of it, but a really big part of it is explained by the fact that not all parts of the brain mature at the same rate. For example, while the child can distinguish between various shapes from birth (finding those shapes – like circles - that most closely resembling human faces the most interesting), the part of the brain involved with color vision isn’t well developed until around three years of age.  

While many of these brain functions mature independent of the influence of sex hormones, others mature primarily under their influence. The androgenic hormones wield the greatest developmental cudgel. They are produced in vast quantities by boys, and in far smaller, but still significant quantities in girls.  

The production of sex hormones begins a noticeable increase around 6-8 years of age, beginning, on the average, a little earlier in girls than in boys. Almost any elementary school teacher will tell you that the fourth grade, when most kids are around 9, is a real watershed year in both behavior and in the kind of schoolwork a child can do.  The behavioral and the intellectual changes are both functions of a brain that is literally beginning to change its structure under the influence of hormones. 

So it isn’t just the body that is affected by androgenic hormones, it’s the brain, and as we will see, this explains a lot about why the young males lead the pack in terrorist “field operations.”  

Thanks in no small part to androgenic hormones, young males are “over-represented” in contact sports, dangerous hobbies, risky occupations, schoolyard fights, daredevil activities, combat situations (military and street gangs), serious “positioning” in their social and work lives, in violent crime, and consequently, in the prison system. It should come as no particular surprise, then, that terrorism, with all its excitement and danger, should have a special appeal to young males.  

Of course, in order to apply for a position as a terrorist, one must to be properly “primed” with an irrational philosophy, and that’s where Islam comes in. From an irrational philosophy come 1) a faulty moral code, 2) a distorted vision of what the proper relationship among people is, and 3) a truly screwed up “sense of mission” in life. 

But WHY is this the case? Just what do sex hormones do to the brain’s structure to predispose it to the sort of thinking and behavior that can make terrorism, crime, contact sports, combat, etc. seem so attractive? 

Imagine that you have a special visual capability that gives you the power to see things the way a functional MRI does. An “fMRI” can see increased blood flow to parts of the brain that are working hard. 

You already know that the brain has two halves connected to each other by a band of tissue. Viewed from above, up towards the very front, on each side of the groove that divides the two halves, there’s a spot called the “medial prefrontal cortex.” That’s terribly important to this discussion, because this is the place where conscious thought occurs – things like judgment and the ability to evaluate the significance of the information that we take in. The medial prefrontal cortex is the spot that contributes so heavily to the “why-most-terrorists-are-young-males” phenomenon. 

The medial prefrontal cortex in the young brain is – well, young, immature, and poorly developed. It doesn’t perform the functions of judgment and evaluation with the same ease that it does in somewhat older people. When information comes in, the young brain has to exert a huge effort, compared with the mature brain, to understand its significance and “get it right.” The parents of most teenagers know exactly what I’m talking about, and for the most part, it isn’t a case of “bad parenting” that produces many of these problems. 

Since the young brain has so much difficulty evaluating and assessing information, the “default position” tends to be that there is a lot of danger out there in the big wide world, and the young tend to respond emotionally and attitudinally precisely as if that were the case. As a result, the young often tend to appear somewhat paranoid, to lack self-confidence, to be somewhat defensive, and to have “trust issues;” therefore, they are quite often volatile, depressed, and hostile.

For the young person to make the assumption of widespread danger makes a lot of sense, from an evolutionary survival point of view. Since the part of his brain involved in judgment isn’t up and running very well just yet, it is much safer for him to assume that the world is a threatening place. When you think about it, his lack of ability to evaluate information with accuracy and ease really does make the world a dangerous place for him, even though the danger comes from his problems with judgment, not from the world itself. Either way, assuming the world to be a threatening place serves to help make him more vigilant (although not any more cautious). In short, the adolescent and young adult “assume the worst” very easily.  

Remember the clarion call of the young during the sixties and seventies, “Don’t trust anyone over 30!”? Well, the reason for this was that around 30, there is a HUGE change in the medial prefrontal cortex, and the under thirty crowd picks up on the change like bloodhounds on the scent. 

Both the under thirties and the over thirties have a structure in their brains called the “amygdala,” which mediates raw emotions (such as undifferentiated anger and fear). You experience this when there is a loud noise nearby, and you don’t know what it is; your initial response is unpleasant – a startle or fear. Then you take a look, get more information, and make a judgment. It is either something bad or it isn’t, and you act accordingly. 

In both the young person and the adult, the amygdala functions equally well, but in the older person, all those raw emotions are more efficiently processed by the mature, well-developed medial prefrontal cortex. When this happens, the raw emotions are subjected to all kinds of processes that assess, evaluate, and determine the significance of the information that stimulated the production of the raw emotion. The under thirty crowd, with their immature medial prefrontal cortex, can’t do the job of figuring it all out nearly as easily as the over-thirty crowd can. 

You can actually see physical evidence in the brain of the amount of effort it takes the young medial prefrontal cortex to figure out whether information that it’s presented with is benign or threatening. 

The brain has specialized areas devoted to different tasks. When one of these areas is hard at work processing its special kind of task, more blood flow is required than when it is at rest. Your “fMRI vision” can detect this increased blood flow. 

The medial prefrontal cortex is one of the specialized areas. It’s amazing to watch the difference in the blood flow to the medial prefrontal cortex of the young compared to that of mature brains. As it turns out, it is very difficult for the young brain to accept a positive situation as positive, but it is very easy for it to accept a negative situation as negative. The young brain has to make a tremendous effort to determine that something is OK or good, while it takes almost no effort to assume that something is a problem or a threat. In real life, most kids and very young adults just don’t want to bother go to the trouble of making that big effort, so you get a lot of characteristic defensive nostril-flaring behavior from them. 

Kids between 12-19 years old have hardly any blood flow to the medial prefrontal cortex when presented with a negative stimulus; they are primed to assume that everything is out to get them. They have a lot of blood flow to the area when presented with a positive stimulus, though; the medial prefrontal cortex lights up like a Christmas tree. It takes kids in this age group a lot of work to determine that the situation really is benign, and that everything really is OK.  

In the 20-29 year-old age group, there is a little more work going on to assess the significance of a negative stimulus, but there is still a lot of effort going on trying to determine whether the positive stimulus is really something positive. There’s not very much difference between the 12-19 year olds and the 20-29 year-olds. 

In the 30-49 year-olds, though, a tremendous change takes place. The amount of work it takes to evaluate a negative or positive situation accurately has almost equalized. The medial prefrontal cortex of the 30-49 year-old brain has finally matured enough to enable it to evaluate both negative and positive information accurately with relative ease. Suddenly, there is a lot more “balance” in his responses. He is better able to trust his own judgment, he is generally less tense, the pressure to go out there and do unto others before they do unto you diminishes. There’s more willingness to trust, more self-confidence, less hostility, less hair-trigger “sensitivity,” and a lot less nostril-flaring than there is in younger groups. 

The effect is even more pronounced in the 50-79 year age group. Older adults focus far more strongly on positive elements, and downplay negative ones. Mature adults just don’t get “riled up” as easily; in fact, a calm, reasoned approach is the very hallmark of maturity. Most of life is not lived under the gun, and so “positive” is recognized as “normal,” not “news.” When a mature adult gets fired up about something, it tends to be on a selective basis.  

Because the medial prefrontal cortex, the processing center for the evaluation of incoming information, is so poorly developed in the 12-29 year-olds, there is a very strong tendency for them to assume the existence of threat “out there.” In the well-developed medial prefrontal cortex of the over-30 age group, it is easier to process information accurately and speedily as either threatening or non-threatening. 

The result is that most terrorists are younger males. It really takes very little to convince them that there are enemies all around them, that the infidel is out to get them, and as males awash with androgenic hormones, there is a strong tendency to respond to threats with physical aggression. Since the adolescent and the young adult are in the early stages of acquiring a philosophy of life, if you tell them that killing infidels is what Allah wants them to do for the greater glory of Islam, you have an easy mark for Terrorist Candidate School. 

It’s hard enough for young males raised in rational circumstances to act like civilized human beings. When you do the Islam thing to them, and then add to that the sense of invulnerability of the young (his fundamental lack of conviction that death, the real thing where you “cease to exist,” is something that can actually happen to him), then terrorism-wise, you have a “Perfect Storm” waiting to happen. 

OK, so being young and male sets one up to do some really stupid things, but what is it about Islam, other than teaching its kids that they’re being constantly mistreated by the infidel, that motivates the young Muslim male to commit acts of terror?  

It’s because during adolescence, for better or for worse, we begin to develop our philosophy of life. The hormone surge is causing all sorts of brain re-organization to take place, and the change isn’t limited to the maturation of the medial prefrontal cortex. It involves all kinds of mental functions. 

Intellectually, the child moves from the percept-oriented kind of thinking that characterizes childhood into the concept-oriented kind of thinking that characterizes adulthood. It’s the beginning of this change that is noticed by the Fourth Grade Teacher.  

Emotionally, the child is moving from a fearful, threat-oriented view of the world where he depends on mommy or daddy for security to an “I can handle it” independent and self-confident view. 

Ethically, he is moving from a position where he does or doesn’t do something because he will get a reward or punishment, to a position where he can use reason effectively to assess what is right or wrong. 

It is during adolescence and through young adulthood that we are acquire, among so many other things, a sense of mission in life – Who are we? What is the meaning of life? Why are we here?  

The Muslim is at a singular disadvantage in all these spheres for his entire life. Islam throws up very effective obstacles to normal maturation. If you’ve ever thought that what they do looks a lot like the temper-tantrums of two-year-olds (only instead of yelling and kicking and holding their breaths until they turn blue, they blow people up), you were right. While we all experience the developmental discomfort of adolescence and young adulthood, most of us eventually outgrow it and mature, becoming productive, happy human beings. 

Not so the poor Muslim child. He is subjected to a life-long brainwashing program that denies him the normal sense of mission acquired by most human beings - to to become the best person he can be, and to become productive and happy on this earth.  

The Muslim indoctrination program begins at birth with the “shahada,” the “confession of faith,” that is whispered into his ear as soon as he is born. From that moment on, it pounds into him that the spread of Islam is the most important thing in the world.  

He is taught that everything in the Koran is the unalterable word of Allah, even the parts that contradict each other, even the parts that can be proven to be false, and that it is his Allah-driven religious obligation to spread Islam by any means, up to and including the use of murder and mayhem. In order to motivate him further, he is taught that the reason the rest of the world has outstripped the Islamic world in productivity, prestige, and happiness is that there is a giant worldwide conspiracy, run primarily by the Jews and their Christian puppets, that is utterly preventing Muslims from making progress!  

He is taught that the world is a whimsical, capricious place where nothing can be fully understood by his incompetent human mind, where nothing is predictable, and where he has no control over anything, including the course of his own life. Allah controls every event, every nanosecond, for all eternity, and everything could change in an instant if Allah wished it. He understands completely why so many Muslims end so many sentences with “If Allah wills.” That is not a mere social convention or sign of respect; it’s a genuine, heartfelt hope.  

There is no natural law governing existence in Islam; there is no Law of Identity – A isn’t necessarily A, it might be B in a little while, or C or D tomorrow – who is to know? There is no Law of Causality – we think fire burns cotton just because Allah generally makes it do that, and we get into the habit of expecting fire to burn cotton. But we all know that it’s not really fire that burns cotton, it’s Allah. . . 

The only way to gain release from the chronic stress of uncertainty and of being out of control of one’s own destiny is to die and go to paradise.  

Our Muslim child is further taught that the only way to be 100% guaranteed a ticket into paradise is to die killing infidels.  Since the average adolescent male has a sexual thought or feeling every 14-18 seconds, it stands to reason that the promise of happiness in paradise for the young martyr candidate includes endless sex with 72 women who are continuously recycled virgins. As an added incentive, he is often told that he can choose up to 70 relatives and family members who will receive a free pass to paradise after he kills the aforementioned infidels. 

Given the peculiar worldview that Islam burdens its members with, it hardly comes as a surprise that, given the nature of the young male brain, young Muslim men are so often willing cannon fodder in the desperate Islamic bid for world domination. Under the unremitting pressure of Islam, older Muslims often retain the absurd notion that it is the rest of the world, not Islam, that is responsible for all their misery. However, instead of going out into the field to blow themselves (and others)  up, they usually contribute to the “cause” by filling low-danger positions ranging from command and control, strategic planning, fund-raising, da’wa (“outreach” to attempt to prepare the susceptible infidel to accept Islamic domination), political infiltration (to gain influence over policy) and other non-suicidal missions. 

So long as Islam exists in its present form, we will be targeted by young Muslim males who act under the influence of their “spiritual” leaders to disrupt our lives. Little by little, unless we act appropriately, the world will turn into a series of fortresses, always watching for the next “disturbance.”