“Muslim Marine Murderer’s father sexually assaulted wife and beat son”

A Facebook friend of mine shared this Daily Mail article with the following comment:
“Sad… well educated, accomplished, but lost spiritually… perfect for being radicalized…”

I was haunted by this ever since Mohamed Atta and his gang of terrorists forced us to consider it.

What made them snap?

It couldn’t be their religion.
First of all mainstream Islam, like all other bona fide religions, does not condone senseless murder.
Secondly only a very small minority of the Islamic immigrants become ‘radicalized’.
Thirdly, some of them even turn on their own people.

What if they use religion, Islam in this case, as a pretext for destruction rather than a way to connect with the others? As religion was meant to – reliegare, in Latin, means ‘connecting to’.
What if for them religion is more about ritual than about true spirituality?

I’ve slowly reached the conclusion that what these guys are doing can be interpreted as a form of ‘assisted suicide’. They are pissed off by what has happened to/around them, they blame it on the ‘society’ and they just want out. So they commit suicide and exact vengeance at the same time.

Maybe we need to pay closer attention to what the classics have taught us.

Emile Durkheim, Suicide.:

“Suicide is used by Durkheim as a means of demonstrating the key impact of social factors on our personal lives and even our most intimate motives. The book succeeds brilliantly, both as a technical study of suicide and as a fundamental contribution to this broader issue. Students of sociology will continue to be required to study this book, which will remain on the sociological agenda for many years yet to come.” Anthony Giddens.