Young Men are The Problem

This is the start of a three part series on violence in the world, in our cities and in our communities. It makes the case that the single cause is young men between 15 and 29, societies filled with young men and religions that push young men towards violence, as opposed to towards marriage.

Young Men are The Problem
by Frank Hilliard

Mark Steyn's thunderbolt of a book, America Alone, made the case that Western Europe will soon be an Islamic state, that all of Western history and culture is threatened and that a new dark age will shortly be upon us. The reason for this is that Islamic societies have a birthrate three or four times that of the West. They are out-breeding us in every maternity ward in the world.

Young men in Hamas

That would be trouble enough—the end of Civilization as we know it—but it isn't the only problem, or even the most immediate. The immediate problem is that a society that breeds so fast has a very young demographic makeup. They have more young men and young men are prone to violence.

Muslim societies are particularly vulnerable to the effects because they have few, if any, productive enterprises. If you take oil off the table, you're left with desert sand, scrub bushes, cement block buildings and mass unemployment. So not only do Arab societies have more young men, they have more unemployment, thus more reason for young men to be violent.

In the following video, Martin Kramer, an authority on the Middle East, makes a strong case in just a few short minutes for the idea that a surplus of military-aged males is a big part of the Middle East's problem. Take a look:



There are a lot of good quotes in this speech, but the one that hit me was, "Radical Islam is a way for the superfluous son to enter history." Another comment was that the West should stop providing pro-natal subsidies for these societies because these only exacerbate the problem (I'm paraphrasing).

"Those subsidies are one reason why in the ten years from 1997 to 2007 Gaza's population grew by an astonishing 40 percent. At that rate Gaza's population will double by 2030 to three million."

All those extra babies turn, inevitably into recruits for radicalism, so anything that can reduce the birth rate of these countries will reduce terrorism (I'm paraphrasing again). Kramer doesn't say we shouldn't be in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban, but he does say the country's population is set to double, and there's no doubt our efforts to combat infant mortality will help that number grow.

"What will 28 million more Afghans and 20 million more Yeminis do? What about the nearly 80 million more Pakistanis who will be added by 2030? This explosive growth will drive radicalization through another generation at least and push it into Europe and America though immigration."

Kramer says there is hope because fertility rates will decline in these countries, as it has in Iran, and older populations reject radicalism. This is like hoping the current deplorable situation with Islamic fundamentalism wont get worse despite scores of millions of additional Jihadists and tens of millions more surplus, angry, testosterone loaded young men. It is as faint a hope as I've ever heard anywhere.

It's like hoping the enemy runs out of bullets when its armament factories are set to double. Is this realistic? No. What Kramer has laid out; what Mark Steyn laid out, is a recipe for either a) cultural domination by Islam, b) a war started by Islam, or c) both.

If you're happy watching the Olympics, enjoy it while you can. There won't be any of that nonsense if the current, observable, quantifiable, trend continues. We're in a war that we're losing.

And each day we're losing at a faster rate.

[more to come in a second post]