National Review yesterday excerpted a Dalrymple piece from their forthcoming printed version. The piece has already received 600+ comments.

Citing researchers at King’s College London who say British jihadists are both the most numerous and the most brutal of the Westerners joining ISIS, Dalrymple seeks to answer why. He cites the disproportionately high rate of social and economic failure among Muslims in Britain for their numbers (a series of self-directed failures, he points out; in short, the jihadis are losers), and the brutality of British culture for their extremism, while decrying “the sheer stupidity” of Islamism itself.

[F]ailure is not necessarily easier to bear in a more open society than in a closed one: On the contrary, resentment is all the stronger because of the additional element of personal responsibility for that failure, actual or anticipated. In some ways, life is easier, psychologically at least, when you can attribute failure entirely to external causes and not to yourself or anything about yourself. The relative failure of Muslims (largely of Pakistani origin) is evident by comparison with Sikhs and Hindus: Their household wealth is less than half that of Sikhs and Hindus (immigrants at more or less the same time), and while the unemployment rate of young Sikhs and Hindus is slightly lower than that of whites, that of young Muslims is double. Sikh and Hindu crime rates are well below the national average; Muslim crime rates are well above. Racial prejudice is unlikely to account for these differences. Jihad attracts ambitious failures, including those who are impatient or fearful of the long and arduous road to conventional success. Jihad is a shortcut to importance, with the added advantage of stirring fear in a society that the jihadists want to believe has wronged them, but that they are more likely to have wronged.