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LONDON — What
leads young European Muslims to blow
themselves up on trains and at
airports, to shoot down shoppers and
concertgoers? It is
a question often asked ever since
homegrown suicide bombers brought
carnage to London’s transportation
system in 2005. The attacks in
Brussels have highlighted that it
remains largely unanswered.
Those sowing terror in Europe are
not foreign jihadists but European
citizens, most born and brought up
on the Continent, in places like the
Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek.
The apprehension spreads beyond
Europe; authorities in the United
States, too, are increasingly
concerned about homegrown attackers.
The conventional view is that
homegrown terrorists are created
through a process of
“radicalization,” a conveyor belt
that draws vulnerable individuals
through several stages from
religious belief to jihadist
violence. An
influential 2007 New York Police
Department report, “Radicalization
in the West: The Homegrown Threat,”
described a four-stage process of
pre-radicalization,
self-identification, indoctrination
and jihadization, through which
people are “funneled” into
terrorism. To be a “pre-radical” is
simply to belong to a Muslim
community; to “self-identify” is to
accept Salafist beliefs.
Indoctrination means being groomed
by a jihadist organization;
jihadization is the end point.
This schema caught the imaginations
of politicians and policy makers and
became central to counterterror
policy. The New York Police
Department, for instance,
established a secret surveillance
unit to spy on Muslim communities,
eavesdropping on mosques and cafes,
looking for the signatures of
radicalization. The program
eventually shut down after much
public controversy and two federal
lawsuits. Yet, according to a
Brennan Center for Justice report,
the approach continues to influence
the F.B.I. and other law enforcement
agencies. The
F.B.I. issued its own report, “The
Radicalization Process: From
Conversion to Jihad,” that
identified four stages of
radicalization. Indicators included
“wearing traditional Muslim attire,”
“growing facial hair” and “frequent
attendance at a mosque or prayer
group.” Like the New York Police
Department, the F.B.I. has conducted
widespread surveillance of Muslim
communities. In
Britain, the government’s flagship
counterterrorism program, Prevent,
includes surveillance of
schoolchildren and college students.
Official guidelines suggest that
signs of radicalization include
changing one’s “style of dress or
personal appearance” or using
“derogatory names or labels for
another group.” Another sign,
according to leaked teacher training
materials, is an overt interest in
Palestine or Syria. Among nearly
4,000 people identified last year as
supposedly exhibiting signs of
radicalization was a 4-year-old boy.
In France, mass closures of mosques
and organizations suspected of
enabling radicalization are
underway. Yet the
evidence suggests that the concept
is flawed and that such
anti-jihadist measures are
ineffective, even counterproductive.
A secret British government
memorandum leaked in 2010 dismissed
the idea that there was “a linear
‘conveyor belt’ moving from
grievance, through radicalization,
to violence.” A 2010 American study
sponsored by the Department of
Homeland Security similarly noted
that radicalization “cannot be
understood as an invariable set of
steps or ‘stages’ from sympathy to
radicalism.” Many
studies show, perhaps
counterintuitively, that people are
not usually led to jihadist groups
by religious faith. In 2008, a
leaked briefing from Britain’s
domestic security service, MI5,
found that far from being religious
zealots, many involved in terrorism
were not particularly observant.
This view is confirmed by Marc
Sageman, a former officer with the
Central Intelligence Agency who is
now a counterterrorism consultant.
“At the time they joined, jihad
terrorists were not very religious,”
he observed. “They only became
religious once they joined the
jihad.” The paradox
is that the concept has become
central to domestic counterterrorism
policy even as government agencies
discover it’s wrong. There is a gap
between the reality of jihadism and
a political desire for a simple
narrative of radicalization.
In recent years, the official view
of the process has become more
nuanced. An F.B.I. website aimed at
teenagers acknowledges that “no
single reason explains why people
become violent extremists.” Updated
British strategy also accepts that
“there is no single cause of
radicalization.”
Yet the idea of a conveyor belt and
telltale signatures of
radicalization continue to be
influential. For
many, though, the first steps toward
terror are rarely taken for
political or religious reasons. As
the French sociologist Olivier Roy,
the pre-eminent scholar of European
jihadism, puts it, few terrorists
“had a previous story of militancy,”
either political or religious.
Rather, they’re searching for
something less definable: identity,
meaning, respect.
“The path to radicalization,”
reported a British researcher,
Tufyal Choudhury, in 2007, “often
involves a search for identity at a
moment of crisis.” This occurs, he
suggested, “when previous
explanations and belief systems are
found to be inadequate in explaining
an individual’s experience.”
Finding few answers in mainstream
cultures or belief systems, some
search elsewhere, on the fringes. In
the past, this might have led them
to join movements for political
change — that was certainly the
route I took in my youth. Now,
however, such movements often seem
as out of touch as mainstream
institutions. So, shaped more by the
politics of identity than by
progressive politics, some find
meaning in a highly tribal, stark
and vicious vision of Islam.
Ironically, some are as estranged
from mainstream Muslim communities
as they are from Western society.
It is not through mosques but
through the Internet that such
jihadists discover their community.
Dissociated from social norms,
finding their identity within a
small group, radicals come to see
world events as an existential
struggle between Islam and the West
and feel empowered to commit acts of
horror.
Counter-radicalization policies fail
because they look for signs of
radicalization that are in reality
meaningless, and try to disrupt a
nonexistent “conveyor belt.” They
have helped to create more illiberal
societies without challenging
jihadism, nurturing a mind-set in
which a 4-year-old child can be
viewed as a potential jihadist,
while real terrorists slip the net.
Our whole counterterror strategy
needs a rethink. |
