For boys who do not wish to stack the shelves of supermarkets, or work in Primark, or study hard for higher education in accountancy or medicine, as their parents might wish, they are presented with an intoxicating romantic vision of life and death in the arid landscape of Mesopotamia.
A second, potent part of the jihadi appeal is the promise of sex. Here is one of the ugly hypocrisies of fundamentalism.
On the one hand is a deeply puritan, repressive 'theology' that subjugates women and seeks to stamp out normal physical contact between the genders. On the other is a misogynistic vision of paradise, reminiscent of a sleazy Las Vegas nightclub, full of nubile, insatiable women eager to please their men.
In one of the more grotesque versions of Islamic fundamentalism, the spiritual reward for each 'martyr' will be the company of 72 voluptuous virgins. This vision has an undoubted appeal to a sex-starved young Muslim from urban Britain.
But the reference to 72 virgins in paradise has absolutely no basis in the Koran, or in authentic Islamic theology. It comes instead from a dubious hadith — or prophetic tradition — that was produced three centuries after Mohammed's death.
In fact, militant jihadism has no religious legitimacy at all. The zealots might like to see themselves as devout believers, but in fact they are profoundly un-Islamic.
The Koran specifically declares that Muslims are allowed to take up arms for only two reasons: either because of religious persecution or because they are being driven from their homes.
But it is laughable to pretend that either of these conditions applies in contemporary Britain. The only Muslims in the UK I know who have been evicted from their homes are those who have failed to keep up with their rent or mortgage payments.
In the same vein, there is not the slightest justification in the Koran for the persecution of non-believers, most especially Christians.
Indeed, Chapter 109, verse 6 specifically confirms that everyone has a right to believe as they please and in Chapter 2, verse 256, Islam's holy text says that there is no compulsion in religion. Therefore no Muslim can demand that anyone should be forcibly converted to Islam — precisely what the barbaric Islamic State has been doing in northern Iraq at the point of a rifle.
Furthermore, Chapter 22, verse 40 states that all places of worship, including Christian churches and Jewish synagogues, should be respected as houses of God, the very opposite of the IS campaign of callous destruction and religious intimidation of all non-Muslim minorities.
The words of the Koran are being twisted and perverted to serve the jihadists' ends. In Britain, the silence of the moderate Muslim majority is only serving as an ally of bigotry and injustice.
We should be condemning with utmost urgency the atrocities committed in the name of Islam.
In the aftermath of the tragic July bombings in 2005, there was not a single march organised by the UK Islamic community against those fanatical killers.
No Muslim group took to the streets chanting 'not in my name' after the brutal murder of 52 innocent people by these Muslim assassins.
Yet just a year later, for three weekends in a row, London was brought to a complete standstill by Muslim protests about the publication of a cartoon of Mohammed in an obscure Danish magazine.
Not only did those demonstrations show contempt for freedom of expression, which is not only one of the bulwarks of Western democracy, but is also sanctioned in the Koran. It was a demonstration of a warped sense of religious injustice.
That is what we are unfortunately witnessing again today. Mainstream Muslims in Britain have yet to come out against the toxic forces of militant jihadism, which is inflicting so much carnage and suffering across the Middle East.
Unless we do so loudly and clearly, we are colluding with a theological tyranny that has no basis whatsoever in Islam's sacred scripture.
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