The study's authors make a number of recommendations to bolster efforts against radicalization, including promoting public denunciations of terrorism by the media and public officials; increasing political engagement; improving community/law-enforcement relations; increasing civil-rights enforcement; and supporting enhanced religious literacy (Muslims with rigorous religious training are far less likely to radicalize)."Rigorous religious training," eh? You mean teaching 'em "jihad is the way; sharia is the goal"--Islam's be all and end all--will help ensure they won't be tempted to pack heat in their undies? Good to know. I hear a therapy regimen of fingerpainting and video games works, too.
Update: A piece in FrontPage points out the humungous pothole along the anti-"radicalization" road--the fact that it's educated, Westernized young men who are taking up the jihadi cause (my bolds):
Nidal Hasan, Abdulmutallab and Humam al-Balawi are jihadists who were educated and came from privileged middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Hasan was an American-trained U. S. Army doctor, Abdulmutallab was a London engineering student and the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker, and double-agent Dr. Humam al-Balawi was a member of the Jordanian professional class.The answer: if they're jihadists, there's no need to effect any kind of reconciliation. Their mission--jihad is the way; sharia is the goal; and if you blow yourself up for Allah, you're fast-tracked to an eternity of boffing your very own heavenly harem--is crystal clear.
Many Westerners are confused by the willingness of university-educated middle-class Muslims to perpetrate barbarous acts of terrorism. It appears to be a reversal of the usual process: typically college students raised in religious households become more secularized by exposure to the humanities and sciences, and the rationalist values of the European Enlightenment. Yet when embryonic jihadists attend Western universities they graduate with their faith intact: 9/11 terrorists Mohammed Atta and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were both beneficiaries of Western university educations. These men, who sought to advance themselves with Western training and technical skills, ultimately turned against, and attempted to destroy, the very society that provided them with the means to that advancement. Instead of employing their newly acquired learning and knowledge to improve the lot of their fellow countrymen and co-religionists, they turned this very learning and knowledge against their Western benefactors.
This phenomenon begs the question: How do jihadists reconcile such hypocrisy and ingratitude in their own minds?