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by natvod 3867 days ago
Here's a very relevant article about how French youth get radicalized: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-other-franc...

Major points:

Unless you have the right connections, go to the right schools, have the right French names, it's very difficult to get a good job. Even more so if you come from banlieues. With no job prospects and isolation from mainstream society, some Muslim youths retreat to religion and out of those, some discover and/or led to radical ideologies.

If you read the article, you'll see that there are some Muslims who are trying to rescue these youths. I feel this could be part of an actually solution. Since Muslim youth won't trust outsiders at all, the government can provide Muslim community leaders some resources to intervene in the lives of youths that are going down the wrong paths from crime to radicalization.

Also, they can consider setting up programs for parents to identify the signs of radicalization and educate them about how to intervene and de-escalate. Apparently, a father of one of the Paris attackers even went all the way to Syria to persuade his son to come home. Even after offering him a plan where he didn't have to go to prison but could resettle in Algeria and try to rebuild his life, the son refused. After a certain point in the radicalization process, there seems to be a point of no return.

Clearly, just bombing ISIS is not going to work when the majority of these terrorists lived in Europe.