WORLD DEFENSE REVIEW: "American kill," said the five-year-old boy. "Bush I kill." And as his proud father watched, beaming, he demonstrated how to cut the evil American's bare throat.
So it was in a Birmingham, England, home – as recorded secretly by British security services a few months ago while investigating the child's British-Pakistani father, Parvis Khan, then a suspect in a plot to kill a Muslim British soldier. This week, after his plan had been thwarted by MI5, Khan was sentenced to life in prison.
And what will become of the boy?
If he is lucky, he will learn from the example made of Dear Old Dad, and steer away from Islamic extremism completely. More likely, angered by the British infidels who took his father away from him, he will follow in Parvis' footsteps and endeavor to continue the work his father started.
And he will be, indeed, a formidable soldier for jihad: if he can slit a person's throat at five years old, just imagine what he can do at 20. (After all, Mozart, whose father Leopold was neither Muslim nor Pakistani but did serve as his teacher, began composing at the age of five. I leave it to readers to do with that parallel what they will.)
He may, for starters, do the way they do in Denmark, where last week, Muslim youths committed over 80 arson attacks in major cities, setting not just cars, but even schools in flames. This unrest followed a decision by Denmark's Jyllands-Posten to republish the 2006 cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed; it is blasphemy, in Islam, to depict Mohammad's image, and those cartoons were met, when they were first published, with anti-Denmark demonstrations and riots throughout the Muslim world.
This time, the cartoons were re-issued as a gesture of solidarity in response to new threats made on the cartoonist's life. Unsurprisingly, Muslim leaders – in Denmark and elsewhere – have had little to say about the actual plan to murder a newspaper cartoonist over a drawing; to the contrary, Iran's Press TV remarked: "This repeated insult towards a religion shared by 2.5 percent of the Danish population and more than 20 percent of the world's people may also have opened old wounds and fueled the violence in the country."
That European Muslim youth are radicalizing at a rapid rate is, of course, nothing new. What is notable is their age, which grows increasingly younger. And we are woefully unprepared, even as we should have seen this coming, to deal with it.
And we should have seen it coming. As radical youth, usually second- and third-generation immigrants, reach their early and mid-twenties, they are having children of their own, and raising those children according to the principles of fundamentalist Islam. Add to this the increasing number of women also flocking towards salafism, and you have an instant two-parent jihadi family, creating a home environment that can't but engender similar world views in the children. Before his arrest, Parviz Khan was already preparing his three-year-old daughter to marry a terrorist. I doubt he was the only such father on the block. Europe's Muslim Radicals: The Next Generation >>> By Abigail R. Esman
Mark Alexander (Paperback)
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