True or false: the vast majority of young men are, at any given moment, just a few behavioural leaps away from doing something very, very stupid.

This (terribly sexist) observation was made recently by one of the men I am close to, as we watched a news report on the teenage Afghan-born terrorist killed after he stabbed two Melbourne police officers.

Not having ever been a young man myself, I was intrigued by this front-line testimony. Could it be true?

The circumstantial evidence seems strong. This week saw the bail hearing of the 17-year-old apprentice mechanic from Brisbane who is up for assault and other charges following his racist attack on an African train guard. His exit from the Brisbane Magistrates court, ciggie in hand, was a perfect portrait of halting adolescent bravado.

Last weekend was an extraordinarily violent one in Bondi, thanks to the actions of various young men emboldened by binge-drinking. The local police inspector had an explanation for the spike in young man-on-young man violence.

"It was just the fine weather", he said, explaining that it had people out in greater numbers.

Young men do not have a monopoly on stupid behaviour. As a recent refugee from the land of young womanhood, I can confirm young women can be real idiots too. 

But as far as I can tell, young men are more likely to be stupid in an outwards direction. It seems it is only angry young men who celebrate spring by shattering the skulls of random strangers.

Other people buy a sun-dress or go to Floriade.

The other cohort of young men who have crossed the stupidity barrier is, of course, the group of wannabe jihadis who have travelled to Iraq and Syria to wage war on, among other things, the liberal pluralism they have grown up in. There are between 120 and 150 of those, according to estimates cited by Attorney-General George Brandis.

All these are examples of violent male youth, albeit on different platforms and to varying degrees.

It is politically useful to portray the young Muslim men as outsiders, rejecters of the Australian way of life, refusers of our democratic and liberal traditions, and therefore not belonging to us. But the truth is that angry, stupid and destructive young manhood is something Australia does rather well.

The good news is we are not alone in that – every culture has its angry young men, alienated and (in their minds) ostracised, intent on revenge against those who have disrespected them.

The impulse is widespread but cultural differences seem to dictate, to a large extent, where that anger is directed. If you're a drunken Anglo bloke of a certain stripe you might punch a stranger on the street. If you're a young man of Lebanese descent living in south-western Sydney, the cultural influences you're subject to can take you and your anger in an altogether different direction.

Terrorism offers not just violence and destruction, but grandiosity. To the embittered adolescent or post-adolescent male ego, this must be very attractive.

In the 1990s Sydney was panicked by a different cohort of disillusioned and dangerous young men, a group who genuinely frightened many, who worried they would somehow poison Australian society.

They were also the sons of immigrants, many of them refugees. Their alienation from mainstream Australian society was the latest iteration of an old migrant story. Their parents brought them to Australia for a better life, but they ended up falling into the fissure between the strict expectations of their traditional families, and the expectations of a mainstream culture which demanded they "fit in" while never really allowing them to.

They were, of course, the Vietnamese immigrants of Cabramatta.

It's easy to forget how much hand-wringing this small cohort aroused in Sydney (and nationwide) at the time, and how much it fuelled the anti-Asian xenophobia given voice by Pauline Hanson.

The xenophobia took root because it was based on incontrovertible fact. Then, as now, the concerns of the xenophobics were not invented. The drug gangs of Cabramatta were comprised of Vietnamese-born people. They were violent and disrespecting of "our" laws. These gangs caused the social fabric to break down – heroin was sold out of restaurants and there were frequent overdoses on the street. Ordinary people were endangered by all the mess that came with their drug dealing – from gang-related violence and petty crime to syringes in children's playgrounds.

The perpetrators, the gang members, were almost all young men of Vietnamese heritage. A brilliant documentary aired on SBS last year, Once Upon a Time in Cabramatta, retraced the stories of these immigrants and gave insight into the forces that shaped the crime problem that for a while defined their community.

The stories of the young men were not dissimilar to the stories of many of the young Muslim men of south-west Sydney today. They felt estranged from their parents, many of whom worked so hard they were unable to provide much supervision. In many cases, parent and child didn't share a common language. Some fathers abandoned their families, leaving boys without role models. The kids encountered racism at school. They felt torn between cultures.

Circumstances conspired to alienate them, and in the case of the Vietnamese boys, that alienation found its expression in the Asian drug gangs which, according to this documentary, represented a sort of family for some of them.

The ideology radicalising a generation of young Muslim men is frightening because it represents a total rejection of everything their parents sought when coming to Australia. And that ideology, at its most extreme, is hateful and destructive on a global level that the Anglo culture of booze and biff will never be. But it is wrong and unhelpful to see these men as a different species.

They are simply the result of the age-old angry young man problem, combined with a new and pernicious ideology which frightens reasonable people because it seems to hate us so much

smh.com.au