From Mark Steyn's site:

Letter of the Week
ALIENATED? GET OVER ITGreat column about the politically-correct myopia of CSIS et al when it comes to Jihad. I'm fed up with the silly line that poor Muslim kids are practically forced to buy ammonium nitrate by their feelings of alienation. ("Who ya gonna believe?" )

I grew up Anglo and Irish in Quebec City at the height of the separatist follies. The grade school I attended had hate messages spray-painted on its brick walls. People would give hostile glares and even rebuke us on the street if we spoke English. I was attacked on several occasions by the children of separatists, who had no doubt heard their parents spewing venom about the damned "English". Laws banned English education for most people. Business signs in English were made illegal, with a special language police set up to enforce the rule. Of course you know all this.

My point: not that I knew the word then, but it's safe to say that I felt "alienated" by the surrounding culture. It's clear I was harassed and I don't think persecution is too strong a word for some of the things done to my ethnic group.

Now ask me how many bombs I planted. None, of course. Neither did any other English or Irish kid of my generation. Neither did we plot to behead or kill anyone.

When journalists, in their coverage of the Mississauga terrorist plotters, start lecturing about how "alienated" these kids felt and how they were pushed into terrorism by the cold unfeeling culture around them, my bullshit meter goes off the scale. It's not alienation. It's something else. Hint: look in the Q-U-R-A-N.

John Kane