Meeting a Brick Wall

The Wall Street Journal did a fine article yesterday (Monday, 27 Oct 2014), entitled "Mothers of Western Jihadists Reach Out", by Alistair MacDonald.

Briefly, she went to the Canadian families of two recently killed pop-jihadists in Syria, along with the families of the two guys involved recently in Canada with attacks on innocent people.....then talked to a German mother who lost her son to the pop-jihadist campaign.

All of this leads around to what drew these gentlemen to the "fad" (my name for it).  None of these guys felt part of their community....some were drug-users....and some were simply lost in the big world of life.  If you have ten minutes, the article is very worthy of reading, and makes you ponder a number of things.

Mullahs and charming characters came in....gave them something to think about, and drew them into mental decisions without a lot of complex thinking or serious decision making consequences.  In brief, they had nothing to live for, so pop-jihadism made sense.

In Germany, you sit and review the integration kids and young men who've come out of the system.  They were sitting in some foreign culture....doing OK in school and bound to fit into some marginal skill job.  Their family made the decision that life would be better in Germany.  The family arrives....the kid gets thrown into a school classroom that is probably two years more advanced than what he's capable of handling.  Toss in language issues, and he's automatically three or four years behind his normal age group.

In essence.....for the family's practical sense....they've condemned this kid to a reasonable expectation of failure.  The German school system?  It can do a lot....but this has failure written all over it.  A back-up or tutor atmosphere?  If you had money, fine.  If you had a parent who was intellectually developed, fine.  If you had a local social office or neighbor who was giving of precious study time and help, fine.  That's not the case in Germany.

So, every year....you can figure thousands of these immigrant kids have floated through the German system and somehow got enough credit to just be certified and dumped.  Some can hope for a job with the garbage pick-up service, maybe beer delivery guy, or perhaps a street-cleaner job.

In essence, the German system put a kid out there with no real expectations, and the Mullah has prime territory to roam and try to brainwash the kid into various schemes where death will be the final outcome....one way or another.

Fixing this?  I'm pretty practical on this.....it's physically impossible to pick up the bulk of these kids in the integration channel, and drag them to success.  It's not possible with the numbers involved.  You'd have to bring massive tutor services into every community, charm the teachers into identifying the kids who need real help, and then find the resources which currently don't exist.

All of this.....while trying to act cordial and friendly with a religious-dominated society in some way dragging along on integration.

The sad part of this story is that it's just another chapter to a long story on families trying improve their lives, and find a safe place for their kids.  They had good intentions.  It's just that they couldn't estimate the massive wall to be climbed and what really lays on the other side of the wall.