Goldberg: ISIS a Foreign Legion for Losers

National Review's Jonah Goldberg writes about who is being recruited from the West to join ISIS. He calls the Islamic State "a Foreign Legion for losers."

Many of the Westerners flocking to Syria and Iraq for “jihad tourism” don’t have any of the usual excuses one hears for terrorism. Just like the 9/11 hijackers, they are often middle-class, educated, and technologically adept.

What they are not is assimilated. They may have passports identifying them as American, French, or British, but they are not American, French, or British in their hearts.

These labels do not give them the meaning and mission in life they crave. And Western democratic capitalism bores them.

Often the children of immigrants, they are literally misfits; they don’t fit in with their parents’ native culture, but they also haven’t connected to the society in which they now live.

If they lived in a ghetto they'd join a gang.  ISIS is way cooler than a gang, but the motives and rewards are much the same - a license to kill, rape, and steal, to go viking.