FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 636 17/6/15

WHAT ATTRACTS SOME BRITISH YOUNGSTERS TO ISIS? COULD IT BE...THEIR OWN WICKEDNESS?
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BAD, BAD KIDS!

What leads many a happy British youngster to join ISIS? What are the causes or reasons of ‘radicalisation’? Vexed questions, heatedly debated. Answers vary, depending on your ideology, preference, false consciousness or self-interest.

Voila’ at random: restoring the Caliphate, Wahhabi/Salafi influence, adventure, alienation, boredom, loot and plunder, anger at Britain’s foreign policy, brainwashing, sectarianism, hatred of Assad regime and even sex. Maybe any of these grounds or all of them together convinces you. The priest’s explanation however is more elementary, more pitiless, more theological. The reason some of these kids flock to fight with the Islamic State is because they are bad. Real bad. Wicked, in fact.

Too crude and simplistic? Pray, consider some well-known, indisputable facts: ISIS publicly chops off the heads of innocent prisoners, captures and rapes and sells women on the slave market, throws off homosexuals from high buildings, lashes offenders, drives Christians from their homes and so on. All such atrocities are well documented. The media have been covering them again and again for months. The Caliphate guys themselves upload graphic videos and boast of their gory executions. Is it possible anyone travelling to the Levant is unaware of them? I submit not.

Many British youngsters, like three runaway London schoolgirls, aged from 15 to 16, have gone to join ISIS. Some say those girls have become jihadi brides. Maybe but… Do you believe they had never watched the News or Caliphate propaganda material online? I don’t. They must have known the bloody deeds of that dismal outfit. Yet they have become part of it.

The girls, along with other youngsters, show sweet, innocent and gentle faces. Like angels. Indeed. But do you think angel-faced kids are ipso facto incapable of being evil? The ancient Greeks believed that physical beauty and moral goodness went hand in hand. (The opposite also obtained. In Homer’s Iliad the ugliest of all Greeks, Thersites, is an obnoxious character.) Experience disproves that. Many a notorious criminal looked cherubic. Jon Venables, one of two teens convicted of the horrific murder of baby Bulger in UK, was described as angel-faced. Examples could be multiplied. Thus, innocent and pure looks are compatible with actual wickedness. Too bad yet too true.

Current Western culture is so paranoid about dreadful episodes of child abuse that it assumes that youngsters must always be morally guiltless, regardless of evidence to the contrary. It thus shuts its eyes to the unpleasant reality that kids too sometimes can be guilty of terrible things. Freudianism is a deplorable doctrine but Dr Freud was right when he showed that buried under the bourgeois myth of the ‘little angel’ lie dark and obscure forces, turbid and aggressive elemental impulses. It is not therefore implausible to argue that many British youngsters now swelling the Caliphate army may have eagerly looked forward to their share of bagatelles like head-chopping, sinner- lashing, slave owning, gay murder and slaying of Christians.

This is not to focus unfairly on outrages perpetrated in the name of Islam. ISIS also majors on tormenting and slaying fellow Muslims, such as Shia, Kurds and Sufis, so its evil intents are internecine, as well as directed at those technically deemed ‘infidels’. That reinforces my point. Wickedness’ boundaries are not merely confessional but universal. And bad kids like to hurt right, left and centre – they enjoy it – that’s it!

Secular, lay mentality is conceptually poor when it comes to understanding the real, deep causes of evil. Traditional Christianity is smarter. I know notions like ‘original sin’ put many people’s backs up. They unite Muslims and secularists in a common aversion. Yet the wisdom of the Church down the ages has always acknowledged the truth of the fused sublimity and depravity of the human race. The biblical doctrine of the Fall of Man encapsulates that sober realisation. When Jesus said that ‘from within, out of the heart of man come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery’ and so on (St Matthew 7:21-22), he  knew what he was talking about.

Postulating the doctrine of original sin as the root cause of evil in the world invites the riposte: ‘But then what can be done? If evil is in the very nature of man…Do we have to resign ourselves to it? Do nothing? Perhaps even excuse the wicked youths?’

It does not follow. The Church teaches that God’s grace, baptism, the Sacraments, spiritual direction and the like empower men to master their evil drives. And likewise the best Muslim sheikhs abhor violence against the innocent, the ways of ISIS and that gang. They preach openly and sincerely against them and proffer remedies. Ultimately of course criminals, young or old, have to be stopped. Justly punished and taken care of. All that is right and necessary in this fallen world.

Don’t mean to be self-righteous, folks. Fr Frank admits to a wide streak of wickedness inside him too. (As a young man, I planned to become a mercenary in Africa!) Priests are human, all too human. However, I draw the line at the slaying of the innocent and the righteous, selling or buying females on a slave market, murdering deviants or any other minority groups. Those are sins that cry to Heaven for vengeance. I trust one day the Lord of Heaven will do so.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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