This topic touches a concept we've been tossing around at work of "Identity"

The general gist is that everybody possesses multiple "identities", and that those identities have some personal hierarchy, and that there is also essentially a cut line above which are identities one is willing to die for, and below not.

So, as example one may identify by their gender, region, profession, nationality, family status, race, ethnicity, hobbies, music likes, etc, etc.

The culture one lives in shapes a general "norm" in any given community. Our theory is that in the modern information age those "norms" are evolving far more rapidly than in the past, and there are going to be far more individuals within a community who adopt a family and hierarchy of identifies that are outside that norm.

For example, a third generation French citizen living in Paris may come to prioritize their Algerian heritage above their French citizenship.

Or a British citizen who feels strongly against the UK's policy toward Afghanistan may come to prioritize his support for those who he or she feels his country wrongly oppresses.

Over the past several years the establishment writes such events off as some sort of mental disorder, and say that someone has been "radicalized." This is a natural tendency of governments to write off such individuals as being either somehow crazy or corrupted by some powerful external force. We think it is much more a simple fact that people have free will, and are free thinking and in an age where they are exposed to so much more information have a broader range of choices that they will naturally make.

So, these men may well be British nationals, but it would be an interesting conversation to dig into how they identify, how they prioritize those identities, and how their identifies evolved to the ones that bring them to their current situation.

Just something to consider.

Bob