Studies on radicalization & comments

[bourbon]

While the Somali context isn't handled very well, the NYT nonetheless has an interesting, lengthy case study of the radicalization of Omar Hammami (Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki).

NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE PREVIEW
The Jihadist Next Door

By ANDREA ELLIOTT
Published: January 27, 2010

A very fascinating and well done article. Here’s what stood out to me:

If anything has remained a constant in Hammami’s life, it is his striving for another place and purpose, which flickered in a poem he wrote when he was 12:

“My reality is a bore. I wish, I want, I need the wall to fall and the monster to let me pass, the leash to snap, the chains to break. . . .
“I’ve got a taste of glory, the ticket, but where is my train?”

Yet for all of his social triumph, Hammami was consumed with a profound internal conflict. He didn’t know whether to be Muslim or Christian. On rare trips to Damascus when they were little, Omar and Dena were warned by relatives that they would go to hell if they weren’t Muslim, Dena recalled. In Perdido, their mother’s family insisted that hell was reserved for non-Christians.

A trip to Damascus the summer before Hammami’s sophomore year would make a lasting impression on him. He loved the order of things: how his aunts waited on him, how his male cousins shared a “cohesiveness of brotherhood,”...

When he got back to Daphne, Hammami remained conflicted. One night before he went to sleep, he turned to God for guidance. “Slowly I started to incline toward Islam,” he later wrote to his sister, “and my heart became tranquil.”

Hammami plunged headlong into Salafism, mastering its nuances and lexicon. The movement gave him a new sense of brotherhood and discipline. But it was, above all, “an excuse to disobey his father,” recalls Joseph Stewart, a Muslim convert who became close to Hammami.

Hammami concluded that his Salafi mentors had been “hiding many parts of the religion that have a direct relationship to jihad and politics,” he wrote. He began searching for guidance on the Internet, Culveyhouse says, discovering a documentary about the life of Amir Khattab, a legendary jihadist who fought in Chechnya. The documentary traces Khattab’s evolution as a promising Saudi student who gave up a life that “any young man would desire” to embrace a higher purpose. Hammami was mesmerized, Culveyhouse recalls.

....
Back then, Hammami and Culveyhouse talked about jihad in the way that star football players at Daphne High School dreamed about the N.F.L. The idea remained romantic and hypothetical.

That same month, Hammami seemed more taken by his cause than ever. “I have become a Somali you could say,” he wrote in the December e-mail message. “I hear bullets, I dodge mortars, I hear nasheeds” — Islamic songs — “and play soccer. Sometimes I live in the bush with camels, sometimes I live the five-star life. Sometimes I walk for miles in the terrible heat with no water, sometimes I ride in extremely slick cars. Sometimes I’m chased by the enemy, sometimes I chase him!”

“I have hatred, I have love,” he went on. “It’s the best life on earth!”

[tequila]

The asshole sounds like half the guys in my boot camp platoon. Bored kids looking for meaning and finding it in the wrong place. Sometimes I think 70% of our jihadi problem is the lack of a decent non-religiously oriented "cause" or institution in most Muslim countries --- a Marine Corps equivalent to join in order to find challenge and a sense of identity.

[marct]

Hi Tequila,

The asshole sounds like half the guys in my boot camp platoon. Bored kids looking for meaning and finding it in the wrong place. Sometimes I think 70% of our jihadi problem is the lack of a decent non-religiously oriented "cause" or institution in most Muslim countries --- a Marine Corps equivalent to join in order to find challenge and a sense of identity.

This has been a real problem in North America for about 40-50 years or so. A friend of mine spent a fair amount of time researching some of the radicalization amongst Jewish kids in the 1980's, and the pattern is pretty much the same. I saw a similar pattern looking at a lot of people who joined modern Craft and some of the Charismatic groups as well.

It is one of the central problems in large, secular societies - we don't have many good, functioning, rites of passage. Also, because there isn't a single, unifying, religious symbol system, we have a mishmash which has a really hard time working together. Personally, I think the Romans had a much better system with the Pontifex Maximus .

[Tukhachevskii]

I saw a similar pattern looking at a lot of people who joined modern Craft and some of the Charismatic groups as well.

Is that Craft as in World of Warcraft?

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to another observer Tim Stevens, Kings ICSR, who has pointed to this Dutch report; link:http://english.nctb.nl/current_topics/reports/ where it is the first report

Summary:

The Jihadist movement is the driving force behind the current worldwide terrorist wave that is carried out on the pretext of a religious armed fight, the ‘jihad’. This movement derives its strength largely from its ideology. There is increasing consensus that Jihadism should be combated not only by repressing it, in the form of a war against terrorism or by means of intelligence organisations and police, but rather by also addressing it specifically at the level of ideology. The knowledge of Jihadist ideology is, however, still limited. This study aims to provide insight into this ideology, the strategy derived from it, and the method of production, reproduction, and propagation of this ideology and strategy, in order to improve the capability to counter Jihadist terrorism.

Yet to be read fully, on a quick scan looks interesting.

[Tukhachevskii]

Hat tip to another observer Tim Stevens, Kings ICSR, who has pointed to this Dutch report; link:http://english.nctb.nl/current_topics/reports/ where it is the first report

.

I've read through it once quickly and am impressed with its grasp of the subject matter but (and it's a big BUT) I am still averse to describing Jihadists as some kind of fringe movement. Furthermore, and this irks me no end, the admonition to study the "ideology" of Jihadism when IMO it's not an "ideology" but a totalisitc worldview (or "religion", a word I have problems with in this respect too); being a Dutch (therefore dependant upon a post-modernist multicultural/relativist paradigm) product it is no wonder they are hard pressed to say the I word (thats Islam to you and I). Furthermore, the presentation and explication of Jihad follows almost to the letter what Muslim "moderates" would have us belive rather than revealing the centrality of Jihad to Islam (reminiscent of Calvin and the calling of the elect in extreme Protestantism). Also, and I think this is something not many have commented upon, is the strange prediliction we have of assuming that we and they inhabit the same "worlds" in which time and space are interpreted through similar paradigms but articulated through difficult languages (hence the priority of diplomacy, communication, radical- translation, et al) when in fact the conflict is not over "interpretation" (although that's a big part of it) but over "constituion" of the world according to different understanding of what the "good life" should be. It's not a question of somehow "getting through" to them (based on the assumption that we all want the same thing, see the world in the same way, and that everything is, at bottom, identitical with only our languages vielling reality) but instead its a question of whose "way of life" in the widest phenomenological sense is going to prevail in our respective AOs. We don't live (or "dwell" as Heideger would have said) in the same "world" and the until we begin grasping that issue (among others) we will always interpret the "jihadists" as we want them to see themselves and not as they actually do see themselves. Unfortunately, I can't copy and paste segments from the article to illustrate my point but I will attempt to do so in greater depth (and one hopes greater cohesion) later in order to more fully adumbrate my concerns.

OTOH here's an article I find better conforms to my own line of thinking although there are still issues I would accentuate and others I would relegate to the sidelines, S.P. Lambert, Y: The Sources of Islamic Revolutionary Conduct http://www.dia.mil/college/pubs/pdf/5674.pdf

[Bob's World]

Query:

Is one "radicalized" by the government that they believe is oppressing them; or are they radicalized by the organization that comes along and offers them an alternative to that oppression?

As I always say, the Pied Piper is a fairy tale. If the conditions (real or perceived) of poor governance do not exist, no amount of leadership or ideology is going gain much traction with the populace.

Personally, I find the whole concept of "deradicalization" just one more blame shifting tactic to soothe ourlselves that we are merely victims here. This is not helpful, and it will not work.

[marct]

Is that Craft as in World of Warcraft?

Nope - Craft as in Witchcraft .

[William F. Owen]

Has anyone done any work on why people became communists, nazis or fascists?

Anyone inquired as to why some Native Americans got "radicalised" and rejected the authority imposed upon them?

My point is, if what is radicalising them is "the political reality" then the only real issue is do they express their politics using violence. - if they do that, then kill or incarcerate them, in line with what the law allows.
Nothing you can or or say, will stop some kid becoming a suicide bomber - and if you can, then he's not one of the ones to worry about.

[marct]

Hi Wilf,

Has anyone done any work on why people became communists, nazis or fascists?

Tons of work done after WW II, especially on the ability to compartmentalize (this is just an example).

Anyone inquired as to why some Native Americans got "radicalised" and rejected the authority imposed upon them?

Funny you should mention that - I'm talking with a colleague of mine about looking at that in the Canadian situation. And, yes, a lot has been written on that particular topic. The same can also be asked about why the Irish "got radicalized and rejected the authority imposed upon them" .

My point is, if what is radicalising them is "the political reality" then the only real issue is do they express their politics using violence. - if they do that, then kill or incarcerate them, in line with what the law allows.

[tongue in cheek]

Well, I certainly would agree with the first part of that. As to the second, I'm sure some of our colleagues who are descended from the violent, godless, anarchist insurgents under MAJ Washington, might, possibly, disagree.

[/tongue in cheek]

Nothing you can or or say, will stop some kid becoming a suicide bomber - and if you can, then he's not one of the ones to worry about.

Maybe nothing you can say or do can stop him or her from becoming one, but it can certainly start them becoming one .

[davidbfpo]

(Taken from and only partial) Has anyone done any work on why people became communists, nazis or fascists? Nothing you can or or say, will stop some kid becoming a suicide bomber - and if you can, then he's not one of the ones to worry about.

Wilf,

Over the decades lots of academic work has been done on radicalization; I assume in the past this research has reflected contemporary issues and after WW2 the totalitarian temptation. There are some continuities and what appear to be new factors.

Contemporary terrorism or political violence, is assumed to be the end result of radicalization and is best described as "an old wine in a new bottle". It is possible to dissuade and prevent a 'kid becoming a suicide bomber'. There is plenty of evidence to that effect.

There are many unresolved aspects to the preventative aspects of counter-terrorism, not helped when even the experts do not agree on the process, the signs and how to respond (as reflected in other threads).

Just a quick, considered response.