Hi, and welcome to week five of our class.
Our topic for this week is radicalization.
Last week, we looked at the content,
the substance of the ideas that motivate the al Qaeda ideology.
Today, we're going to start looking at the process by which individuals go through,
to which they come to believe in the al Qaeda ideology and
even take violent action to perpetuate it.
But let's start with the basics,
a couple of definitions.
First, what do we mean by radicalization?
I would call radicalization the process through which an individual
adopts and comes to believe in radical ideas.
And that begs the question of radical, what does that mean?
A radical idea, or a radical person,
is one who advocates
fundamental or revolutionary change in current practice, conditions, or institutions.
Now, radicalization then of course is the process by which
somebody comes to believe in these revolutionary ideas.
And also, there is the concept of radicalization to violence,
which is that you come to believe in these ideas so strongly
that you would engage in violent activity to promote them.
Now, I think a good place to start our discussion of radicalization is
the ACLU's argument represented in one of
your readings for this week that radicalization is really none of your business.
And I think what they mean none of your business,
it's not society's business to try to prevent or the
government's business in looking into,
because radicalization, the taking on of ideas about revolutionary change,
is the fundamental freedom that individuals ought to have.
There is, in their view,
nothing dangerous about people having these ideas so long as they don't
engage in criminal action to further them, especially violence.
And that the government should be restricted from looking into or investigating
people's ideas and only taking certain actions once criminal activity is imminent.
There's much to be said about the ACLU's point of view,
but I think when radicalization that we've seen to
the extent of an attack with the magnitude of 9/11 occurs,
it does become a question of how our society,
and that's government working altogether, could minimize,
reduce this form of radicalization,
which often does lead to violence.
So, maybe a disagreement,
but I think it's always important to keep this distinction in
mind that radicalization is not criminal.
It does not have to be violent.
And indeed, individuals have a First Amendment right to believe whatever ideas they want,
whether they're radical or not.
Let's look at some of the misunderstandings about this process,
by which people come to engage and join al Qaeda and adopt its beliefs.
Some seem to think that radicalization is almost like an infection,
like a mosquito giving you a virus,
or an infectious disease,
and then you inexorably becoming ill from that infection.
And I think that's a very inept analogy.
There are many radical ideas floating around the world,
and lots of us are exposed to them,
but very few of us ultimately end up adopting them.
So, it's not just that any exposure to
radical ideas is ultimately going to make us become sick,
take on these radical ideas and actually want to engage in violence.
It's not that simple.
With respect to the al Qaeda inspired ideology,
some believe that it's incredibly widespread in this country,
and it's a phenomenon that's deeply ingrained within certain populations.
Congressman, Peter King, from New York has been
quoted as saying that the testimony we have on
radicalization is from Sheikh Kabbani that he thought
over 80 percent of the mosques in this country are controlled by radical imams.
Certainly, from what I've seen in dealings I've had,
that number seems to be accurate.
Well, there's not really facts to back up these assertions.
If you look at public opinion polls of Muslim Americans,
if you look at the websites, the statements,
the actions of large scale Muslim American organizations,
you realize that very few of them hold
radical ideas in terms of adopting the al Qaeda ideology.
In fact, the vast majority of people explicitly reject al Qaeda's violence,
al Qaeda's ideas about what Islam does and does not require.
So, I think this notion that radicalization of this type,
or really of other type as well,
whether they be anti-government ideology,
a deep-seated racist ideologies, they're generally,
especially the notion that you should take violent action to perpetuate them,
are really isolated to the fringes of society.
To back up my claim that radicalization to violence is
not a widespread phenomenon in the United States,
with respect to the al Qaeda ideology at least,
I want to show you some data that my colleagues
and I have collected in the years since 9/11.
This graph shows Muslim American terrorism suspects
and perpetrators since September eleventh attacks.
And you'll see that, on average,
over the course of these 12 years,
we've had just under 20 of these perpetrators per year.
These are individuals who have engaged in some criminal activity.
So, there could be many others who have radical ideas but haven't engaged in any crimes.
However, not all of them have proceeded all the way to violence.
Those in the blue were arrested before their plots could be unfolded.
Now, if they had not been detected,
maybe they would have moved on towards violence.
And you can see, only the small numbers in black have actually executed their attacks.
So, 20 individuals per year.
That gives us a little, some data,
on which to base how widespread radicalization is.
To put that in context,
compared to 20 of these perpetrators per year in the United States,
we have about ranging from 14 to as much as 17,000
murders over the last decade in this most recent year,
for which data is collected from the Justice Department,
just under 15,000 murders.
Very few of those are political-related violence,
but nonetheless, 20 perpetrators compared to 15,000 murders,
it shows you the small amount of violent activity
that this particular community is engaging in,
in advancement of this al Qaeda ideology.
Another misnomer or misunderstanding of
this radicalization process is that we can look at an individual's traits,
something about the characteristics that they hold,
and see if this is an individual who might be vulnerable or at
risk of radicalization or more likely to become a radical.
In some ways, that it's something that happens to just one kind of person.
Now, again, from the data that we've collected for our studies,
if you look at just ethnicity of these perpetrators in the United States,
you can see they come from
so many different ethnic backgrounds: African-American, Arab, Somali,
South Asian, white, other,
almost equal amounts in these different categories.
And if you look at most other traits,
you will see a similar dispersion.
There is no, in particular,
terrorist profile or a radical's,
somebody who's prone to radicalization profile of from where they grew up,
their economic background, their nationality,
where they immigrated from.
In the United States,
we have immigrants who have turned to radicalization.
We also have people who converted to Islam who've gone towards radicalization.
And there's different levels of both of those categories.
So, most scholars believe you can't come up with a profile anymore.
There are two traits, however,
that are characteristic, and these are the only ones.
First, men, and also young people.
So, young males, we do know,
are highly susceptible to radicalization.
But this is the only traits that we can say constitute a profile of sorts.
The final kind of misunderstanding of
radicalization I'd like to debunk here is that it is a rigid,
uniform process that acts the same way
upon a group of individuals leading to similar results.
And this framework of radicalization being this kind of process was
characterized in a 2007 NYPD report called radicalization in the West.
I'd like to look at what they said in that report.
They argue that radicalization was a four-phase process,
which individuals would go through.
The first phase, they call pre-radicalization,
was people were generally living their normal life.
Then, they would self-identify with this ideology
that said something that happened to them would lead them to
seek out religion and to then adopt these ideas of al Qaeda ideology.
The third phase was when they would find like-minded people,
join a group, and this interaction with the group of people who felt the same,
had the same radical ideas,
would increase their radicalization,
make them more extreme in their beliefs because of the group dynamics.
And then finally, that this dynamic process would move them to a point where they
wanted to engage in violence in furtherance of those ideas.
And the NYPD report calls this the jihadization phase.
And I think this is wrong for a variety of reasons.
So, this is the NYPD report, but I think,
really, it's NYPD Blue in its conclusions.
Number of problems. First of all,
many, many people go through some sort of personal crisis.
They question their identity.
They have a crisis.
They lose a loved one.
They get angry about politics.
Something terrible is happening in their country of origin.
But this does not inexorably lead to people seeking out religion necessarily,
or to the adoption of this al Qaeda ideology.
Second of all, we see many different sources of grievance and
many different are pathways to some form of violent extremism.
It is not necessarily that an individual goes through this phase one step at a time.
They can have a variety of different sources of
grievance that pushed them into a radical ideology.
Second of all, many people might join groups for
totally different reasons than that they have radical ideas.
So, the idea that the group part must come in the third phase is wrong.
You might join a group because you're lonely,
you might join a group because you want to engage in certain activities with them,
then that group tends to radicalize you.
And of course, the NYPD report that focuses says that
this group activity is necessary to radicalize individuals discounts,
many of the lone wolf terrorist that we've seen more recently in
the United States who never really had a group of like-minded individuals.
And finally, this theory really can't account
for the low amounts of violence that we ultimately see.
If it were so prevalent that individuals who
had something bad happen to them would ultimately seek out religion,
fall in with a group who would radicalize them to violence,
you would really see much,
much more higher levels of violence.
So, the report doesn't really mention
de-radicalization or the idea that even people who have some sort of radical ideas,
they never make it to this fourth jihadization,
as they say, phase.
So, there's some elements of good ideas in the NYPD report,
but I think its description of this rigid,
mechanical process is inaccurate.
