The Islamic underclass of the world occupies a position analogous in many ways to that of our own underclass in South Central Los Angeles:  they can hardly escape awareness of a large, shinier, and by all accounts, more significant world around them;  yet they remain perpetually on the outside, looking in.

The material privations they endure are ultimately nothing new, nothing surprising, and nothing that generations of their forbears have not learned to stoically accommodate, one way or another.  But the contemporary feeling of insignificance is galling in a way that nothing in the past has quite prepared them for.

No longer considering the real world of their neighbors around them a meaningful frame of reference in the media-centric world we all share, they now see themselves and their circumstances almost entirely in comparison to the world "on the other side of the screen," and they cannot help but feel diminished by the comparison.

Even for their more affluent neighbors, it can be difficult and demeaning enough to be reduced to mere spectator-consumers.  But the Islamic underclass can barely even qualify as consumers--which places them effectively in the role of spectators even to consumption.

The human spirit can be a curiously resilient thing.  Much like the gangbangers of South Central, the Islamic underclass has found a way to vent rage at its demeaned position that successfully puts its members in the role of participants, in the larger scheme of things--thereby making them "somebody."