Children of Jihad : a young American's travels among the youth of the Middle East / Jared Cohen.

1. Destination Iran -- 2. Removing the Shackles -- 3. Democracy After Dark -- 4. Nuclear Pride -- 5. "Death to America" -- 6. The Calm Before the Storm -- 7. The All-Night "Party of God" -- 8. Struggling for Dignity -- 9. Babies in the Ba'ath Party -- 10. The Road to Mesopotamia -- 11. Iraqis Who Like Us -- 12. Waking Up in the Insurgency -- Epilogue: The Youth Party.

"While still an undergraduate at Stanford, Jared Cohen traveled extensively throughout Africa, seeking to learn about the continent's troubled state of affairs by seeing it firsthand. He ran with guerillas in the Congo, survived numerous close calls with local warlords, and witnessed the awful aftermath of decades of sectarian violence. After seeing radical Islamist violence beginning to spread across Africa, he came to the conclusion that, in order to fully understand the phenomenon, the Middle East had to be his next destination. Studying on a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, he took a crash course in Arabic, read voraciously on the history and culture of the Middle East, and in 2004 embarked on the first of a series of incredible journeys to the region. Despite the fact that he was a Jewish American, he reached out to Middle Eastern youth in areas few Westerners would ever venture into, putting himself in incredible danger in order to understand their culture, their views on government, on Israel, and on America." "Children of Jihad is Cohen's account of his travels in the Middle East. Cohen's story begins in Lebanon, where he interviews Hezbollah members at, of all places, a McDonald's. In Iran, he defies government threats and sneaks into underground parties, where bootleg liquor, Western music, and the Internet are all easy to access. His dangerous itinerary also takes him to a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, borderland in Syria, the insurgency hotbed of Mosul, and other frontline locales. At each turn, he observes a paradoxical culture at an uncanny crossroads: Bedouin shepherds with satellite dishes to provide Western TV shows, young women wearing garish makeup despite religious mandates, teenagers sending text messages and arranging illicit trysts."--BOOK JACKET.