If a picture is worth a thousand words, what might be the price of one of those words? To an apologist for the more violent aspects of Islam, "youth" is worth millions in whatever currency has the best exchange rate at the time.
Michelle Malkin helped kick off the busy blogging on the "youth" subject today in this post. The subject was also discussed at length by Mark Steyn in his brilliant book America Alone. Why am I discussing it then? Mostly because I'm an egomaniac and really enjoy reading my take on things. It's honesty like that which keeps me out of politics.
Urban riots most often break along racial and ethnic lines while others are driven by political ideology. A small percentage are confined to soccer games. Believe me, alcohol and low scoring sporting events are more volatile than a Molotov cocktail. When you've just finished your twelfth pint and it's nil-nil with 45 seconds left in the game punching the guy next to you seems very reasonable.
The point is, one can usually define a group of rioters by something that binds them deeply together like race, ethnicity or a lack of exposure to the NFL.
Then, in 2005, some rioting broke out in France and the only demographic anybody seemed to have available to describe the rioters was age. Not even specific ages like "teenagers" or "twenty-somethings". All we were offered was the extraordinarily vague "youths". The word was so milquetoast that at first one couldn't be sure if these "youths" wanted to harm someone or simply slow the MySpace servers down. Whatever could be making these "youths" band together and go apeshit?
Upon closer inspection, it turned out that the "youths" in France had something in common other than being kinda sorta the same age. They were primarily Muslim "youths" and, as such, adherents of Islam.
There's rioting anew in France this week and once again it seems it's those impish "youths" who are to blame.
So why can't we just refer to people who are angry, young and Muslim as "angry young Muslims"? Because that would make us insensitive, boorish right-wing boobs.
Remember the "Chechen rebels" who killed hundreds of school children in Beslan, Russia in 2004? We weren't supposed to mention that they were Muslim either. Hmm...
It's kind of like calling the pope a "a cassock-draped elderly resident of Italy" instead of Catholic if he does something controversial.
People on the left desperately want to believe that Al Gore is right about fearing climate change but George Bush is just making all this terrorist stuff up to scare us. So a couple of computer projections become a "climate crisis" and a "planet in peril" but the angry young Muslims flinging the aforementioned Molotov cocktails around are merely "youths". Angry "youths" in one place are difficult to associate with Chechen "rebels" in another. The lefties are probably kicking themselves for letting al Qaeda's Muslim connection be known in the first place. "Occasionally bearded sometime aviation students" just wasn't catchy enough in the dark days after Sept. 11th, I guess. If we begin noticing a Muslim theme in a variety of violent episodes we might have to conclude that it's not all a figment of the administration's imagination.
I say "toh-may-toh" and you say "toh-mah-toh", right?
These "youths" are going to have to do something real awful like not recycling before the American liberals worry about them.
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