The Little We Know About the Jihadists in Our Midst

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/opinion/the-little-we-know-about-the-jihadists-in-our-midst.html

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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.