This is a mantra that I usually hear among quite a number of ‘old-fashioned’ religious Christians or just in the older generation; Basically they always say that liberal parenting (not spanking kids, breakdown in family unit) is responsible for more young people with no respect for authority and an increase in young people becoming terrorists, mass murderers, rapists etc…
But aside from the overgeneralizations, even if we were to entertain the idea that changing parenting has brought about some undesirable traits in many more kids, To say that they result in terrorists is quite insane. There’s obviously some personal issue (not necessarily psychiatric) that drives people in general to commit such acts as opposed to a lack of parental discipline.
Going by my anecdotal experience, I don’t believe that any teens in my school would have been open to the idea or even been slightly comfortable entertaining the idea of things like murder or rape. From the spoiled posh artsy kids to the low life ‘knackers’ who didn’t care about school, they found such things disturbing.
In actual fact, almost all teens I’ve met to have a ‘prosocial’ mindset despite having large grievances against other teenagers or adults who have abused them verbally or physically. In other words, they would still be largely against the idea of violence. Interestingly even those with ideation would still be stopped not just by the criminal aspect but by the emotional aspect ‘Killing that person would traumatise me.’
Generally the descriptions I’ve read of terrorists are of the “1st Gen syndrome”. Where they are raised in the west to immigrant parents, and feel alienated. Not feeling like they belong to their parents culture, or western culture. They are then drawn to extremism to find an identity. I have plenty personal experience of that (though not Muslim culture specifically), and immigrant parents are NOT lax!
The two terrorists I personally know, defining the term as “person belonging to a terrorist organization”, were raised by quite old-fashioned parents. One of the families spanked as a common method of punishment, I don’t know about the other. No 1st-gen syndrome either: one was from a fishing family that’s lived in that Basque Country village for as long as the parish’ records reach, the other from an upper-class family that’s lived in a different Basque Country town for over a thousand years (lastname is very inusual and keeps cropping up through local history). Neither was an engineer: both women, one was a gymnast and gymnastics teacher and the other left town to join her terrorist friends in a training camp at the same time the rest of her class were leaving town for college.
Never underestimate the urge that some people have to blame people they already don’t like for entirely unrelated reasons, for whatever is going wrong in the world.
Historically, there have been a huge number of "theories" which people have put tremendous effort in to, in order to make reality appear pleasing to them. I always remember how much math and twisted physics was put in to trying to hold on desperately to the Earth-centric model of what we now call the Solar system.