While there are psychological and political and religious aspects; most young people who join a social movement are not dysfunctional, or stupid, or crazy--but looking for an answer to a grievance that they see as vital to resolve.

The sociological social movement theory option sees that a particular version of Islamic theology is clearly involved, but unlike the right-wing Islamophobes, recognizes that 99% of Muslims around the world reject it.

The social movement theory option looks at the process by which people with a grievance are mobilized, recruited, find an identity firmed up by collective action, learn the ideology through training by skillful leaders who employ persuasive frames and narratives, and then decide what methodology is needed to create change.

In this model, religious belief matters, as does the relative percentage of people in a religious tradition who embrace a particular religious tradition or theology--or methodology.

Liberals want to sweep religious identity under the rug.

Right-wing Islamophobes want to set the rug on fire.

Ponder these contentions:

The young Catholics who in the 1930s joined the White Rose Society in Nazi Germany and gave their lives to protest antisemitism, where just a bunch of juvenile delinquents who wanted to thumb their nose at the establishment.

The college students who joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s and powered the Civil Rights Movement where just rebelling against society because they were maladjusted.

People who shoot abortion providers just couldn't find a postal carrier.

Spiritual belief is not a dysfunction. It can be focused on good or evil.

Consider the prose from the second pamphlet issued by the White Rose Society:

Now the end is at hand. Now it is our task to find one another again, to spread information from person to person, to keep a steady purpose, and to allow ourselves no rest until the last man in persuaded of the urgent need of his struggle against this system. When thus a wave of unrest goes through the land, when "it is in the air", when many join the cause, then in a great final effort this system can be shaken off. After all, an end in terror is preferable to terror without end.

We are not in a position to draw up a final judgment about the meaning of our history. But if this catastrophe can be used to further the public welfare, it will be only by virtue of the fact that we are cleansed by suffering; that we yearn for the light in the midst of deepest night, summon our strength, and finally help in shaking off the yoke which weighs on our world.  

When glib media pundits indict or deny a religion in and of itself they crush the petals of the white rose and spit in the face of all of us who take our religion or spiritual or ethical beliefs seriously.

May there be an end to Islamophobia and antisemitism. May there be an end to religious strife. May justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

May there be peace on earth.