Why jihad appeals to far too many - and how to defeat it

I cede the floor to Erick Erickson, who absolutely nails it:

The West sees more and more of its citizens running away to the Islamic State not because they have it so bad at home, but because they recognize a void in their lives and they want to fill it. They see the Islamic State filling that void. The West has reduced its chief aim to comfort and self-pleasure. Uncomfortable with your life? Go buy something. Play an app. Have sex. While elites in the West and their high priests think the whole world is an accident -- a swerve of atoms -- most people innately know there is more to life than that. Most people know life does not end at death.

The siren call of the Islamic State speaks to that void. The materialists of the West may think they can fill the void with a jobs program, cash or hugs, but the Islamic State offers something more. It offers meaning, purpose, struggle, danger and death in pursuit of something greater than self. Western elites, having shrugged off such notions as outmoded and silly, cannot compete with the innate longing of a soul wandering to be satiated.

For the West to beat the Islamic State, it must do two things. First, it must wage relentless, awful and violent war against them. The West must make the pain and burden of joining the Islamic State insurmountable and assure that death comes quickly, brutally and before any Islamic fighter can find meaning in the struggle.

Second, the West must recognize there is real truth, real good and real evil. A post-modern elite who cannot recognize truth and is too ashamed of its own history has nothing to offer in competition to the soul satiating ideas of struggle, danger and death.

A Herculean task, given the thorough secularization of the West, but the alternative is too grim to consider.