@kurteichenwald
ANYONE SURPRISED by the recent murderous attacks in Brussels has not been paying attention. Per capita, Belgium is Europe’s hotbed of young Muslims who travel to Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) and then return home, often ready to kill. But these European residents are a different kind of extremist. They aren’t your dad’s Al-Qaeda and aren’t really even ISIS; pretending they are ignores the reality of the threat and provides ISIS with a propaganda coup it does not deserve.
Many of these new-age killers were small children when the World Trade Center fell in 2001 and have spent much of their lives watching major wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Syria. Their knowledge of Islam is limited; they are more like jihadi hipsters than dedicated Islamists, or what some experts in the intelligence community call “jihadist cool.” They celebrate what the Dutch coordinator for security and counterterrorism has called “pop-jihad as a lifestyle.”