Back in August of 2013, a front-page Times article about Palestinian Arab children who throw rocks at Israelis explained: "They throw because there is little else to do in Beit Ommar — no pool or cinema, no music lessons after school, no part-time jobs other than peddling produce along the road."
Today's Times carries a fascinating dispatch from Paris about two Frenchmen, Michael Dos Santos and Maxime Hauchard, who converted to Islam, joined the Islamic State, and appeared as ISIS members in the latest beheading video:
On Monday, news reports quoted friends describing Mr. Hauchard as gentle, joyful and a regular mosquegoer. "He was never rebellious," Philippe Vanheule, the mayor of Bosc-Roger-en-Roumois, told Le Monde.
Mr. Vanheule denied that his town was fertile ground for would-be jihadists. "We have basketball, karaoke, judo, dance," Mr. Vanheule said. "I don't think that we have a lost youth here."
Call it the "midnight basketball" theory of terrorism — the idea that youths resort to violence as a result of a lack of government-subsidized organized youth activities. It was the assumption that underlay the 2013 Times dispatch from Beit Ommar, but it falls apart under the truth of the 2014 Times dispatch from Paris, unless one thinks that French youths are somehow inherently more bent on terrorism than Palestinian Arab ones are, and less susceptible to distraction by less harmful diversions. Today's dispatch from Paris is useful in part because it shows the 2013 dispatch from Beit Ommar for what it is — not a factual report on why Palestinian children throw rocks, but a reporter's theory, untested against a counterfactual alternative.