Boris Johnson, the often-outspoken mayor of London and possible future candidate for prime minister, caused a flap with recent comments that young British jihadi terrorists are "tortured," obsessed with pornography and turn to Islamic terrorism when they can't "make it with girls."
Using a British slang slur to describe the jihadis in an interview, Johnson, posing with an AK-47 on a visit to Kurdistan, said: "If you look at all the psychological profiling about bombers, they typically will look at porn.
"They are tortured. They will be very badly adjusted in their relations with women, and that is a symptom of their feeling of being failures and that the world is against them,"
the Telegraph reported.
"They are not making it with girls, and so they turn to other forms of spiritual comfort — which of course is no comfort."
American-born Johnson, who holds dual citizenship, said he bases his opinion on psychological profiles of terrorists provided by MI5, the British intelligence agency, and blasted moderate Islamic leaders for failure to communicate with the youth who can turn to violent jihad.
"It is very hard. Somehow or other a language has got to be found and it needs to be made by intellectuals, leaders in the Muslim community, to knock on the head the whole jihadi ideology.
"Somehow it really needs to be eradicated at an intellectual level," he
told the Croydon Advertiser on a visit to the Norbury Manor Primary School.
"I think there is a big problem of general self-esteem and people's feeling about what the world holds for them, are they winners in life or not, and the crucial thing for young men from all backgrounds is to get them into work," Johnson said.
He stated that London has a higher youth employment rate than Paris, where 12 were killed in an attack in January by French citizen jihadis.
Johnson criticized Islamic clerics for not being "persuasive in the right way with these people."
He said what was needed is a "proper angry Islamic theological denunciation of what is going wrong," and added, "This problem can only be addressed if Muslim authorities and clerics find a powerful and compelling way of setting up an alternative narrative for young people that makes this seem irrelevant,"
The Guardian reported.
"Somebody in a position of responsibility should be making responsible comments," Mohammed Khalier, director of the Muslim organization Islamix, said of Johnson, The Guardian reported.
"He doesn't care about the discord that it causes in the community."
It's not the first time Johnson has had strong words for jihadist youth. In his regular
column in the Daily Telegraph, he wrote: "I suspect most of us don't give a monkey's what happens to this prat in heaven, whether he meets virgins or raisins — we just want someone to come along with a bunker-buster and effect an introduction as fast as possible."
A spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron commented that Johnson has an "ever lovely turn of phrase," The Guardian reported.
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