In truth, it's not that at all.
I would have to disagree.
Fat, rich, middle class people don't go blowing themselves or others to kingdom come.
The 9/11 extremists all came from relatively comfortable Muslim families. Nothing marginalized about them at all.
Osama bin Laden himself, it bears noting, comes from a Saudi family worth many billions.
A billion Muslims throughout the world in relative peace despite the Koran urging them to strike down or circumcise infidels yadda yadda.
Most authorities guess that the truly radical elements in the Muslim community constitute only perhaps 10 percent of the population. So of course most are living in relative peace.
In Canada, a group of young Muslims (17 of them, I believe) conceived a plot to come to Ottawa, seize and perhaps behead the prime minister, bomb infrastructure, and generally step into a comic book.
They were full of Islamist zeal.
They were also all middle class, and no doubt far more materially comfortable than most Muslims in the world (simply from having achieved middle class life in North America).
Recently, a young Muslim of Pakistani descent, living and working quite successfully in Ottawa, was convicted of conspiring with a British group to blow up targets in London. He was a software engineer, working on contract for the federal government.
Perhaps they felt marginalized. I'm sure they did. But they felt marginalized as Muslims ... members of a faith that they felt had lost its storied place under the sun and needed to regain its place to please Allah.
As you know, some of them even speak of retaking Andalusia ... the Muslim world's old possessions in Spain, which they lost many centuries ago.
Many of these groups have a heavy presence on the Internet, and you can easily read lengthy posts about jihad and martyrdom and what awaits in Paradise.
This shows the power of an idea, Jason.
It is not a case of marginalization as we usually understand it.
Now, in the Palestinian camps, there is obviously marginalization of a more recognizable type ... the poverty, the lack of control over their personal and collective lives, the constant sense of humiliation.
I don't doubt you're right that the heavy pressures they're under would make the decision to become a shahid more attractive.
But an idea has taken hold that makes the usual rational reasons for not killing yourself and others inapplicable ... the idea that murder is a way station to Paradise.
And that has an appeal to some young Muslims, 'marginalized' and 'unmarginalized' alike.
The population needs to be desperate enough already for them to adopt this virgins-in-heaven thing. There needs to be the right soil for the seed to take root. I think you've put the cart before the horse.
By no means have all of those who adopt the 'virgins-in-heaven thing' been marginalized, at least in any ordinary sense.
That's what studies have shown.
You make sense ... perfect sense ... but investigation has shown very many exceptions.
You must have read this many times.
The martyr ideal is a product of marginalization and the martyrs will only disappear when Palestinians feel there is hope for themselves and their children. The only way to do that is to give them true power over themselves. Right now the Palestinians are no better than helots.
If they attain statehood of a real sort, I am sure there will be great improvement.
But there will still be those, even in a prosperous Palestine, that see Israel as a foreign pustule that must be rooted out from the heart of the Muslim world.
This is a fixed, coagulated idea that has something to do with poverty, something to do with political disenfranchisement ... but I believe less to do with either, at this point, than you seem to believe.
