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Last update - 16:49 05/03/2008 Maybe they just like the beat By Bari Weiss Tags: Jared Cohen  "Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East," By Jared Cohen, Gotham Books, 278 pages, $25 Jared Cohen has a killer resume: B.A. from Stanford (history and political science), a master's degree (international relations) from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar, founder of a human rights journal, soccer player, fluent in Swahili. It's enough to make a Jewish mother swoon. To top off this impressive list, the 25-year-old has a new book - his second. While Cohen"s first book, "One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwandan Genocide" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), retroactively examined American policy during the genocide in Rwanda, "Children of Jihad" chronicles Cohen's travels in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Syria during his tenure at Oxford. For his efforts, Cohen has been rewarded with a job at the U.S. Department of State, where he serves as the appointed expert on counter-radicalization and youth in the department's Policy Planning Staff, under Condoleezza Rice. Advertisement Part-travelogue, part-policy paper, "Children of Jihad" begins from the premise that most Westerners think of Middle Eastern youth as extremely violent and religiously fundamentalist. They are anti-American hordes burning flags, and in this are little more than extensions of their hostile governments. Cohen begs to differ. The argument to which his entire book is evidence, is that there actually isn't much difference between "us" (Westerners) and "them" (the youth of the Middle East.) To prove this point, Cohen steers clear of government officials in each country, opting instead for cafes, underground parties and university campuses, where he downs drinks and discusses politics with his Muslim counterparts. In Lebanon, he parties all night on the beach with young people from all political parties. In Iran, he ditches his government minder to attend underground gatherings where they serve up alcohol homemade in bathtubs. He observes Syrians picking each other up via Bluetooth devices. The portrait that emerges from his anecdotes is a far cry from the image of a young militant waving his AK-47 screaming "Death to America." Here are members of Hezbollah eating at McDonald's. Here are traditional Muslims getting down to 50 Cent and Beyonce. The question is: What, or rather how much, to make of this embrace of certain aspects of American culture. Do young Muslims in the Middle East actually care more about designer jeans than jihad? For Cohen, the answer is clear. By his lights, this appropriation of Western culture is nothing less than passive resistance against oppressive regimes. Such analysis is hard not to embrace. Who doesn't want to imagine the next generation of the Middle East as sympathetic to liberalism and democracy? The problem is that Cohen, in his attempt to make this optimistic case, is often forced to stretch thin evidence, or to play down that which runs contrary to his claim. Through much of the book, Cohen focuses on his experiences at parties, which may explain why The New Yorker dubbed him "Condi?s Party Starter." Almost every evening, he goes off with local friends to a different locale. Such parties, in Cohen's reading, are deeply political, and he hammers home their importance again and again in the book. Each "Western" action these youth take is a sign of their disdain for their government. In Iran he writes, "Every drop of alcohol they drink, every hejab that comes off, every beat of Western music they dance to, and every minute of entertainment they enjoy is representative of their rejection of the government of Iran. And it is a collective, if unspoken, effort." Cohen's impulse to examine this nightlife more deeply than an American suburban house party is right. It's true that the youth who attend such parties in parts of the Middle East run the risk of a much graver punishment than grounding. But it's also possible that these parties stem from simple teenage rebellion and the desire to have fun. It's not clear that listening to rap in the Middle East necessarily makes one a democratic activist. Maybe they just like the beat. The problem is that he doesn't provide the kind of reporting necessary to convince us that this really is a sign of something bigger. While Cohen quotes many young people who bemoan the lack of opportunity, especially in terms of education and the economy in their respective countries, no one suggests to him that their Western cultural appropriation is a political statement. Though some talk directly about politics with him, often expressing admiration of America, in the end such conversations, while inspiring, don't do enough, especially in the absence of any kind of hard numbers. As a result, Cohen's argumentation can come off as thin. Summing up a section about Lebanon he writes, "Lebanese youth are breaking the patterns of the past by embracing democracy - even if they don't like to call it that." In another point in the book, he dubs a secret party in Iran, "democracy after dark." These poetic phrases are easy on the ear, but it is too often Cohen who is framing their actions as democratic, and not the Middle Easterners themselves. His declarations about the role of technology in the lives of Middle Eastern youth are especially messianic. They are "digital revolutionaries." "The Internet is their democratic society." But technology is a neutral medium. After all, Khomeini paved the way for his return from exile by distributing cassette tapes with his sermons. Videos on the web teach jihadists how to make suicide bombs. Now, there are bloggers in the Middle East who really are digital revolutionaries. Bloggers like Big Pharaoh and Sandmonkey, who voice their opposition to the current political landscape in their native Egypt, do so at the risk of being intimidated or jailed. But such political dissent is markedly different from setting up a Facebook profile. Cohen's desire to paint Middle Eastern youth in a positive light also forces him to deal sloppily with evidence that may go against his thesis. The most egregious example of this takes place in the Mia Mia Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. Cohen's brave practice in the book is to out himself as a Jewish-American, almost from the start, in his interactions. But in the Mia Mia camp, he opts instead to ask the youth what they would do if a Jew came into the camp. Their answer: "We would cut his head off." Rather than deal with this reality by acknowledging that there are pockets of youth in the region who really do hate Jews - an admission that would serve his overall credibility - he bends over backwards to justify their statement. "It became abundantly clear," that these youth were able to "differentiate between Jews and governments." Their remark was simply meant to shock, he asserts. But there is no evidence to support this claim. By the end of his conversation in Mia Mia, Cohen is convinced that they are sorry for their rash rhetoric. "While none of them said so directly, I know they valued the experience of having someone like me to come in to listen, and I think they deeply regretted having used such harsh language." Later, when young Fatah militants insist on dressing him up in weapons, he admits he was scared, but realized they "were not so much gun-toting masked militants. Instead they were broken souls with lethal toys that they had been forced to play with since a very young age." Later, he refers to them as "fractured souls" and "fragile young souls." Such psychoanalysis in a book that relies on reporting is troubling. There is, however, a striking counterexample to the thin cultural argument Cohen makes through most of the book. In the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq, Cohen encounters young people who are doing more than passively resisting via American culture. Kurdish young people are organizing politically - through the Kurdistan American Society and the Kurdistan Student Union. The Student Union has 158,000 members and 18 branches and is effecting real change in their regional government. Interestingly, there is barely any partying and far more political discussion than in any other place Cohen visits. Despite its shortcomings, "Children of Jihad" succeeds at breaking down some inaccurate generalizations and replacing them with more accurate generalizations, and it does a good job of humanizing Middle Eastern youth by telling their individual stories. As Cohen likes to say in his interviews with the press: 60 percent of the region's population is under 30. This population, usually viewed as a threat, should instead be thought of as an opportunity. About this, he is entirely right. Bari Weiss, a writer living in Jerusalem, is a 2007-2008 Dorot Fellow. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Hamas on the Holocaust Al-Aqsa TV claims Jews concocted the Holocaust. Grasping genocide How a non-Jew in Israel came to understand the Holocaust.

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