Annabel Crabb, in London for Fairfax, ponders Unravelling the mystery of home-grown hatred
... Where would a well-loved young man from a supportive family, having lived all his life in a land of opportunity, find the reserve of hatred necessary to fuel an attack on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of his countrymen? For the Muslim community, the conundrum is more acute. How is it that a young man who grows suddenly more devout in word and deed — apparently absorbed in the Koran — can have growing in him a murderous rage that even his parents do not recognise? ...

On the same subject, the SMH appeases Sydney's love of glam with a nice, big photo of the sister, in Top model's brother is new face of terrorism.

More of the same theme in the London Telegraph, University students at centre of terror plots:
The recruitment of Muslim students at British universities to take part in terrorist attacks is at the heart of the alleged plot to blow up passenger jets, it is feared. ...

Henri Nouwen wrote about the phenomenon of post-modern dislocation, in his 1979 book The Wounded Healer.  Here is the first couple of pages:
The Search of Nuclear Man

INTRODUCTION

From time to time a man enters into your life who, by his appearance, his behavior and his words, intimates in a dramatic way the condition of modern man. Such a man was Peter for me. He came to ask for help, but at the same time he offered a new understanding of my own world! Peter is twenty-six years old. His body is fragile; his face, framed in long blond hair, is thin with a city pallor. His eyes are tender and radiate a longing melancholy. His lips are sensual, and his smile evokes an atmosphere of intimacy. When he shakes hands he breaks through the formal ritual in such a way that you feel his body as really present. When he speaks, his voice assumes tones that ask to be listened to with careful attention.

As we talk, it becomes clear that Peter feels as if the many boundaries that give structure to life are becoming increasingly vague. His life seems a drifting over which he has no control, a life determined by many known and unknown factors in his surroundings. The clear distinction between himself and his milieu is gone and he feels that his ideas and feelings are not really his; rather, they are brought upon him. Sometimes he wonders: "What is fantasy and what is reality?" Often he has the strange feeling that small devils enter his head and create a painful and anxious confusion. He also does not know whom he can trust and whom not, what he shall do and what not, why to say "yes" to one and "no" to another. The many distinctions between good and bad, ugly and beautiful, attractive and repulsive, are losing meaning for him. Even to the most bizarre suggestions he says: "Why not? Why not try something I have never tried? "Why not have a new experience, good or bad?"

In the absence of clear boundaries between himself and his milieu, between fantasy and reality, between what to do and what to avoid, it seems that Peter has become a prisoner of the now, caught in the present without meaningful connections with his past or future. When he goes home he feels that he enters a world which has become alien to him. The words his parents use, their questions and concerns, their aspirations and worries, seem to belong to another world, with another language and another mood. When he looks into his future everything becomes one big blur, an impenetrable cloud. He finds no answers to questions about why he lives and where he is heading. Peter is not working hard to reach a goal, he does not look forward to the fulfillment of a great desire, nor does he expect that something great or important is going to happen. He looks into empty space and is sure of only one thing: If there is anything worthwhile in life it must be here and now.

I did not paint this portrait of Peter to show you a picture of a sick man in need of psychiatric help. No, I think Peter's situation is in many ways typical of the condition of modern men and women. Perhaps Peter needs help, but his experiences and feelings cannot be understood merely in terms of individual psychopathology. They are part of the historical context in which we all live, a context which makes it possible to see in Peter's life the signs of the times, which we too recognize in our own life experiences. What we see in Peter is a painful expression of the situation of what I call "nuclear man."

In this chapter I would like to arrive at a deeper understanding of our human predicament as it becomes visible through the many men and women who experience life as Peter does. And I hope to discover in the midst of our present ferment new ways to liberation and freedom.

I will therefore divide this chapter into two parts: the predicament of nuclear man, and nuclear man's way to liberation.

I. THE PREDICAMENT OF NUCLEAR MAN
Nuclear man is a man who has lost naive faith in the possibilities of technology and is painfully aware that the same powers that enable man to create new life styles carry the potential for self-destruction. ...

Young people, especially males, in transition, are vulnerable to suggestion.

What drives young Peter, or Don, or Ahmed, into the clutches of a crook with a nasty agenda? Perhaps it's continuing injustice, as in Some Air Travelers Are More Equal Than Others, when Saudi princes go to the head of the queue in front of old people and children.

From When the Skies Rain Death:
The fighter plane is the quintessence of modern civilisation, the modern goddess. It is the product of the collective input of all the sciences and the neutralisation of all morals and values. In it converge the laser, micro-optics, microelectronics and high-tech aerodynamics, allowing for precision flying, hairline fine guidance, dead-on targeting and surgical destruction. It is hygienic and ultra-precise and its factories, hangars and assembly plants are as tall and spacious cathedrals. These planes are only manufactured in the most industrially developed states, assembled by huge corporations whose employees inhabit equality-oriented societies and receive high salaries. They can only be piloted by highly qualified individuals. They are simultaneously the product of absolute individualism and institutionalised collective labour. The employees who contribute to their manufacture embody societies that have achieved much; they are the elite, a cut above the rest, the chosen ones, the new Aryan race. ...

At Youtube, Zadok The Warrior.

Young Peter/Don/Ahmed may perceive that the Western economy that promises to deliver health care to his nanna, and education to his children, is held together by the fragility of under-maintained oil pipelines and infrastructure. From Mechanical Pigs Essential to Pipelines:
... "Corrosion is just a fact of life. Corrosion of metal alloys occurs all the time. All that man can do is minimize that or reduce it, but we cannot stop it completely," Arrington said. ...

On the corrosive nature of almighty power, from New York Times Editorial: Our Porous Air Defenses on 9/11:
... The commission asked the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation Departments to investigate whether these false statements were made deliberately. An initial report by the Pentagon’s inspector general attributed much of the problem to poor record keeping and insufficient emphasis on reconstructing events before testifying. A military spokesman suggested that the final verdict, in a report still to come, would find no evidence of knowing falsification. If so, someone will still have to explain why the military, with far greater resources and more time for investigation, could not come up with the real story until the 9/11 commission forced it to admit the truth.

Back to a measure of sanity, from Martin Kettle in Guardian - Dream on, self-righteous leftists and angry neocons:
... You may sometimes get the impression, not least from the selectivity of the British press, that Bush-era American liberalism is discredited and a busted flush. Dream on, you self-righteous leftists and angry neocons with your glib confrontational certainties. As long as Barbara Epstein's peerless New York Review of Books still exists it's alive and well, and can persuade you once a fortnight that something still exists in our intellectual life that is worth passing on.

From the BBC

Multiple Baghdad attacks kill 47
By Mike Wooldridge
BBC world affairs correspondent

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4789253.stm|At least 47 people] have been killed and dozens wounded in a multiple bomb and rocket attack in a district on the south-eastern outskirts of Baghdad.
A four-storey building in the Iraqi capital's Zafaraniya district collapsed; it was located in a popular market containing both homes and shops.
One bomb targeted police on the way to the scene.
Officials and eyewitnesses say the blitz began with a Katyusha rocket hitting and demolishing the building.
A few minutes later, as bystanders were trying to pull injured people and bodies from the debris, a car bomb exploded just a short distance away, causing more casualties and more damage.
Some time after that in the same district, a motorcycle bomber blew himself up among a crowd. And yet another bomb targeted police rescuers, injuring three of them. This is a religiously mixed, majority Shia area of Baghdad.
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Bush: "What was that Pandora's Box Genie in the bottle story again?"

From the Washington Post

Iraq at Home
The Neighborhood War Zone

By David Kennedy
Sunday, August 13, 2006; Page B01

NEW YORK -- The United States is losing the war in Iraq; more specifically, [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/11/AR2006081101333.html|Philadelphia is]. This war is at home, in the city's 12th Police District, where shootings have almost doubled over the past year and residents have spray-painted "IRAQ" in huge letters on abandoned buildings to mark the devastation.
It is a story being repeated up and down the East Coast and across the nation. In Boston, where the homicide rate is soaring, Analicia Perry , a 20-year-old mother, was shot and killed several weeks ago -- while visiting the street shrine marking the site of her brother's death on the same date four years earlier. Last Tuesday, Orlando's homicide count for this year reached 37, surpassing the city's previous annual high of 36 in 1982. And in Washington, D.C., where 14 people were killed in the first 12 days of July, Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey declared a state of emergency.
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Gus: No wonder the leadership of the land of the 35,000 murders per year though of invading a country like Iraq. If the US administration did not realise that what's happening now was going to happen, then the administration should shoot itself and add itself to a sorry list of statistics.. But the Bush administration had to know the chaos that was going to follow. Thus what porkies have they fed us and are still feeding us to sustain the unsustainable?

Iraq has more or less the same number of Murders than the US, except its population is one fifteenth of the US... thus the US-created black-hole that is Iraq has 1500 per cent the numbers of murders than in the US —itself the second murderous country in the world by far, with the most guns floating around, with the most people in its prisons and now equipped with the individual right to shoot first on a whiff of "self-defence" even not under direct attack... a process akin to pre-emptive action.