Jihadi Cool: Extremists are as shallow as they are deadly

[summer]

Newsweek

Anyone surprised by the murderous attack in Brussels has not been paying attention. On a per capita basis, Belgium has been Europe’s hotbed of young Muslims who travel to Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) and then return home, often ready to kill. But the world should hesitate before crediting this attack to ISIS, because doing so tends to infuse the group with power that it does not have.



These European attackers are not like the Al-Qaeda members of old—the radicalized adherents to fundamentalist Islam. Many of these new age killers were small children when the World Trade Center fell in 2001 and have spent much of their lives watching major wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Syria. Their knowledge of Islam is quite limited; they are more like jihadi hipsters than dedicated Islamists, or what some experts in the intelligence community call “jihadist cool.” They celebrate what the Dutch coordinator for security and counterterrorism called “pop-jihad as a lifestyle.”



These are youths who gather in groups, such as the recently dismantled Sharia4Belgium. They know less about Osama bin Laden than they do about Tupac Shakur; Belgians who travel to Syria to fight often revere the deceased American rapper on social media, identifying themselves with his lyrics about life in the inner cities. But these attackers also have their own rap music, hip clothes popular with young Muslims that are sold by companies like Urban Ummah and slogans akin to what might be found on a bumper sticker (“Work Hard, Pray Hard.”) Their tweets often end with terms like #BeardLife and #HijabLife. While in Syria, they send selfies to their friends showing themselves wearing kohl, a traditional Middle Eastern eye shadow.



In other words, these are not intellectual Muslims with long beards and Korans in hand; labeling them jihadis or radical Islamists would be, to them, the highest compliment. In another time or another circumstance, these are young people who would be called losers or narcissistic punks—although they are punks who murder.



It’s easy to confuse Belgium’s new extremists with the ones from the previous decade. The murder of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance who was killed just before the 9/11 attacks, was committed by men who plotted their attack in Brussels. A Belgian extremist cell that was part of the Groupe Islamique Marocain Combattant participated in the deadly Madrid train bombings in 2004. The next year, a Belgian named Muriel Degauque blew herself up in an attack in Iraq, making her the first known female suicide bomber from the West. But the old-line extremist networks have no connection to the “jihadist cool” aficionados.



These shallow Islamists have proved to be a challenge for European countries that use a traditional de-radicalization program for Muslims lured into the world of radical fundamentalists: It’s hard to re-educate people about Islam when they knew almost nothing to begin with. In what may be the most representative event depicting the nature of these new Islamist extremists, two British Muslims, both 22, purchased copies of Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies in August 2014 just before they boarded a plane on the first leg of their trip to join ISIS fighters in Syria.



The numbers of young European Muslims who have traveled to Syria to fight alongside ISIS is frightening. Recent intelligence estimates peg the number at more than 5,000, with about 470 coming from Belgium alone. While that is the largest number per capita of any country in the European Union, France is the leader in raw numbers, with 1,700 travelers to Syria.



What lures these youths into the brutal culture of radical Islam? The answer, according to intelligence officials, would be laughable if it was not so deadly: peer pressure and what might be called Rambo-envy.



“For foreign fighters the religious component in recruitment and radicalization is being replaced by more social elements such as peer pressure and role modelling,’’ said a January 18 report by Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, which deals with militant networks. “Additionally the romantic prospect of being part of an important and exciting development, apart from more private considerations, may play a role.”



Here is where things always get politicized. Trying to stop this conversion of young European Muslims into attackers requires understanding what underlies the change. Political blowhards, unable to tell the difference between hard-core Islamic radicals and practitioners of pop-jihad, rage that trying to figure out ways to intercede in that transformation amounts to excusing the attackers, an argument that plays well for the ignorant but that leaves intelligence officials rolling their eyes in frustration. Proclaiming “this was ISIS!”—when it was just punks inspired by the group—grafts the perception of worldwide power onto the organization, making it seem stronger than it actually is, which markets it as even more attractive to young Muslims seeking adventure and attention.



Let the blowhards blow. Here is what needs to be understood about the murderous practitioners of jihadi cool. Based on interviews with European Muslims returning from fighting in Syria, foreign intelligence agencies estimate that about 20 percent of them were diagnosed with mental illnesses before they left for the Middle East. A large percentage of them have prior records for both petty and serious crimes. And the vast majority of them come out of urban neighborhoods torn apart by economic hardship.



Rik Coolsaet, a professor of international relations at Ghent University in Belgium and a senior associate fellow at the Royal Institute of International Relations, recently wrote about the environment that has caused the development of this youth subculture in his country. Young Belgians, faced with a bleak job market, have higher suicide rates and more high school dropouts than most member states of the European Union.



“Youth representatives in Belgium recently warned that many young people are depressed and feel hopeless,” Coolsaet wrote.



The result, intelligence analysts say, is those European Muslims that become fan-boys for ISIS are taking not a rational stand but an emotional one. “Areas where there are close-knit groups of susceptible youth, often lacking a sense of purpose or belonging outside their own circle, have proved to generate a momentum of recruitment that spreads through personal contacts from group to group,” says a December 2015 report by the Soufan Group, a private intelligence analysis and security company.



In other words, attraction to the ISIS philosophy among European Muslins is like a virus, where proximity to the infected is the most common cause. And the locations where the beliefs are spreading can be just as easy to find as the sites where a disease emerges; in November 2015, Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon identified Molenbeek, a poor immigrant quarter of Brussels, as a hotbed for young Muslims traveling to Syria and back. So it should come as no surprise that the investigation into the Brussels attack immediately tracked suspects to Molenbeek.



And this is what’s so frustrating about the new hipster pop-jihadism. Intelligence officials know most everything. Belgium publicly identified the location where potential terrorists were most likely to be living. On January 25, Europol announced that the threat of an attack was at its highest level in a decade, warning that both France and Belgium were at the highest risk of an attack by those attacking soft targets in the heart of a large city. That is almost as specific as it gets.



Even with all that knowledge, however, disrupting an attack from this new breed of Islamic fans—rather than religious devotees—is enormously difficult. These are small cells of like-minded young people with operational autonomy, not some organization with top-down leadership like Al-Qaeda. Many of them do travel to Syria to learn tactics from ISIS before heading back home on their own. All it takes is some guns, some homemade bombs and some desire for fame to transform a loser into a hero among his friends and allies. And then the world eagerly attributes the attack to ISIS, which takes a bow for an attack its leaders probably knew nothing about and earns more cred that it uses to attract even more devotees.



So here the answer for solving the problem is quite different from the military strategy that was needed to deal with Al-Qaeda. Europe and America can’t simply attack ISIS and expect the problem to be solved, not unless the Western nations want to stop bombing themselves. This time, it is a law enforcement issue, one requiring sources, informants and sting operations, along with economic plans to create some hope for a future among Europe’s youths.



Or the bombastic politicians and talking heads can continue perpetuating ignorance, banging the once-correct drum about a clash of civilizations; riling up the public about a vast, ISIS-controlled network; and ignoring the less-dramatic solutions that need to be pursued. The West is facing a threat from its own residents who want to be Rambo; it should resist the temptation to do the same.

[summer]

smh... millennial terrorists

[eclaires]

I'm going back to read the whole thing, but a few years ago, my brother was starting his special forces training and initially his language was supposed to be Farsi (I think), but it pretty quickly switched to French. I think it was due to the intelligence/threats so I guess because people saw this coming. The first paragraph reminded me of that.

[mrsukyankee]

And this is why the response of 'kill, kill, kill...keep them separate, keep them away, keep them angry" is not going to work. The current Republican response seems to be one, in the US, that is just geared toward making this shit even more 'cool' for the disenchanted.

[summer]

I keep reading how many of them are criminals and involved in a lifestyle far from devout. The younger newer recruits sound more like gangs. I'm trying to understand how they get to the suicide bomber mindset then. The same sort of brainwashing cults do, I suppose.

[ttt]

Mar 23, 2016 7:02:52 GMT -5 summer said:

I keep reading how many of them are criminals and involved in a lifestyle far from devout. The younger newer recruits sound more like gangs. I'm trying to understand how they get to the suicide bomber mindset then. The same sort of brainwashing cults do, I suppose.

A lot of these young men are involved in street gangs first, actually. 

I read a quote from an intelligence officer that these aren't radicalized Muslims - they're Muslimized radicals. They're disenfranchised, aimless, violent young men first, and then they find this extreme version of Islam that allows them to participate in their own real life video game and gives them a "legitimate" outlet for their anger and violent impulses. 

[ttt]

Here's another article that explains Why Belgium? It ties into some of the things we discussed yesterday about the integration of immigrants.

www.vox.com/2016/3/23/11290174/brussels-attacks-belgium-jihadism

In the wake of Tuesday's terrorist attack in Brussels, which ISIS has claimed responsibility for, there's one big question on everyone's mind: Why Belgium? How did this small European country become a hub and a target for radical extremists?

To find out, I called up Peter Neumann, a professor at King's College London and the director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. As the name of his organization might suggest, Neumann is one of the world's leading experts on how people in the West come to commit violence in the name of groups like ISIS.

"THE SECURITY INSTITUTIONS IN BELGIUM ARE VERY, VERY SMALL"
According to Neumann, Belgium isn't just one of many European countries with a homegrown extremist problem; it's the country with the biggest such problem on the entire continent. It's likely, then, that at least some of perpetrators of Tuesday's attacks at least have links to this Belgian radical network (as initial info about the suspects uncovered on Wednesday suggests).

There are at least two reasons why Belgium has this problem, by Neumann's account. First, the country has an especially longstanding and well-organized network of radical Islamist recruiters, making it easier for people to join up there than in other European countries. Second, its police and intelligence agencies are epically undersized, making them incapable of dealing with the past five years' massive surge in jihadist recruiting.

The Belgian state, according to Neumann, mostly turned a blind eye to these problems. So it was "just a question of time until something happened."

What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Zack Beauchamp: How big of a problem is jihadism in Belgium?

Peter Neumann: It's a big problem.

If you take, as a proxy, the people who have gone to fight in Iraq [and Syria], which are now estimated for Belgium to be 500, that's the biggest number per capita in all of Europe. That's why people like me who study this having been saying, for two or three years, that Belgium is top of the list of places where something might happen.

But it's not only the number of people that have gone. It's also relative to the size of the security institutions that are charged with monitoring them: The security institutions in Belgium are very, very small.

If you'd spoken to intelligence people or police people in Belgium, they would have been the first to admit that their agencies were not built for the number of people that they're supposed to monitor.

There's a huge gap between the size of the threat in that small European country and the institutions. Because of that gap, it was really just a question of time until something happened.

Paris was a warning. [The November] attacks were in Paris, yes, but they were essentially prepared in Belgium. So Belgium is at the top of the list for everyone who studies this phenomenon in Europe.

ZB: How did the problem of radicalism get so out of control in Belgium?

PN: There's a couple of things coming together.

In Belgium, like in France and other countries in Europe, you have these areas in cities that have over the past years, if not decades, become migrant ghettos. You had a lot of issues with social/economic deprivation — the best example of that is Molenbeek, the part of [Brussels] where all these jihadists seem to be coming from.

These are parts of Europe that have been completely abandoned by the state, by the authorities, by even Muslim communities. And for a long time, people were happy with that. They would be leaving us alone, and we would be leaving them alone.

But over the years, this situation festered. Jihadist structures took advantage of that, and basically go about their business almost unhindered. What happened after 2011-'12 is that groups like Sharia4Belgium — a prominent group — went into these places and very systematically recruited large numbers of people.

"YOU HAVE MOTIVATION ALL ACROSS EUROPE, BUT PEOPLE DON'T ALWAYS HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY"
The places where those groups operate are the places where most of the foreign fighters are going from, to Syria and Iraq. And they're also the places where we now think those networks are hiding.

It's the combination of having deep social and economic problems, a government that was no longer interested in engaging in those areas, and extremists taking advantage of that vacuum and implanting themselves in those areas. Quite a lot of things have gone wrong in Belgium. Not only in Belgium but also in France.

ZB: Okay, but if Belgium and France have similar problems with neglected and isolated communities, why has Belgium's per capita rate of jihadism gotten so much worse in recent years?

PN: The war in Syria was the cause of this mobilization: That affected Belgium and other European countries. But for some reason — and people in Belgium haven't completely figured it out — it affected Belgium a lot more strongly than other European countries.

If you go to Belgium, that's the first question they ask themselves: "Why us?" I'm not sure I have the perfect answer to that; other European countries are also strongly affected by that, but Belgium seemed to be particularly strongly and particularly suddenly affected.

I think it is correlated with the activities of certain groups — like the one I just mentioned, Sharia4Belgium — which were particularly active in picking up people and channeling them into [radical] structures. Some of them go to Syria, but some of them stay back and become part of the jihadist movement.

ZB: Are there equivalents to Sharia4Belgium — which existed before the Syria war — in other countries?

PN: In some countries, yes, but it was particularly active and particularly strong in Belgium.

Look, there's grievances everywhere. In a lot of countries, people are unhappy, they maybe don't like society particularly much. But not in every place is there something that you can channel your grievance into. And the activities of these groups, and the presence of those groups in particular in Belgium, made it possible for them to channel that grievance in the direction of jihadism.

Whereas in other places, people would have looked around and not found anything. Perhaps they would have been very frustrated but would not have had the opportunity to do something.

So it's about motivation and opportunity, like every crime. You have motivation all across Europe, but people don't always have the opportunity.

ZB: So Belgium had a preexisting network of radical recruiters before the Syria war, who could then really ramp up their activities once the war began. And to make matters worse, the Belgian security forces are unusually weak.

PN: It's a country with a population of 11 million people that, historically, hasn't had a big terrorism problem. It's also a country that's deeply divided within, where you don't really have a functioning federal structure.

All of that contributed to the situation we're having now: We have security agencies that could have maybe coped with, say, 100 people going to Syria, but not 500.

"POLITICIANS IN BELGIUM REACTED TOO LATE"
Compare this to America. In America, we have a country with a population of 330 million and security agencies that are all over the place. And you have 100 foreign fighters to look after.

In Belgium, a country with a population of 11 million, you have 500. And every foreign fighter comes with people who are connected to him [in radical activity] who have stayed at home. So this is a massive, massive, sudden rise of jihadist activity that security agencies were not able to cope with from 2013 onward.

People in the intelligence community in Belgium were pretty open, saying, "Guys, we are completely overwhelmed. We have no idea what's going on, and it'll only be a question of time until something blows up."

ZB: So why didn't Belgium build up its security establishment in response?

PN: No one saw this coming. [In] 2011-2012, you suddenly have people in large numbers — numbers that the agencies and authorities were not expecting — going to Syria and Iraq. And the threat perception wasn't so great, so the growth of these institutions didn't keep up with the growth of the threat.

It's also very questionable whether you can grow security agencies as fast as the threat. You cannot just say, if the FBI is suddenly surprised by 10,000 foreign fighters in America, that tomorrow we're going to hire 10,000 people for the FBI. It doesn't work like that. You have to grow these institutions organically; people have to be trained.

So you cannot double the size within half a year, but that wasn't even the intention. Politicians in Belgium reacted too late to what was happening on the ground. It was a political failure, in terms of not allowing these agencies to grow.

But the more profound failure was to basically allow this situation to grow in the first place: to not engage with parts of the Belgian population that clearly were being abandoned. You essentially allowed a vacuum to rise in your own country. And that's the root cause of the problem: Where you have a vacuum, that vacuum will be filled.

If you have a vacuum that consists of alienated, marginalized people from migrant backgrounds who are socially and economically deprived, then it is only a question of time. Of when extremists go into that, take advantage, and push their narrative — which is basically that society is against you, and you need to engage in war.

[ttt]

Here it is:

www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/a-view-from-the-ct-foxhole-an-interview-with-alain-grignard-brussels-federal-police

Young Muslim men with a history of social and criminal delinquency are joining up with the Islamic State as part of a sort of “super-gang.”

Previously we were mostly dealing with “radical Islamists”—individuals radicalized toward violence by an extremist interpretation of Islam—but now we’re increasingly dealing with what are best described as “Islamized radicals.” The young Muslims from “inner-city” areas of Belgium, France, and other European countries joining up with the Islamic State were radical before they were religious. Their revolt from society manifested itself through petty crime and delinquency. Many are essentially part of street gangs. What the Islamic State brought in its wake was a new strain of Islam which legitimized their radical approach. These youngsters are getting quickly and completely sucked in. The next thing they know they’re in Syria and in a real video game. The environment they find themselves in over there is attractive to them. Just like in gangs in Europe, respect is equated with fear. They feel like somebody when they’re over in Syria. If someone crosses you there, you put a bullet in his head. The Islamic State has legitimized their violent street credo. The gang dimension, and the group loyalty that it creates, make the social media messages by Belgian fighters in Syria to their circle back home encouraging attacks especially concerning.

[sparrowsong]

I've been thinking about this too, about their youth and the fact that most of these boys have been European raised, right? They aren't brand new immigrants. I've been wondering about comparisons to the young men in the US that commit mass shootings, and their glorification of other shootings and shooters. I've been wondering about what's wrong with young men in general, that they seem so badly to need to belong to something, or fight for something, that they cling to these causes without even knowing why. What is missing in their lives that they think mass murder will solve?

Not well fleshed out thoughts but ones that I've had tumbling around the last few months since Paris.

[WanderingWinoZ]

Very interesting, crazy, and scary... TFS

[mbcdefg]

I think these articles may have been posted here a while ago:


ISIS captors cared little about religion, says former hostage
: www.cnn.com/2015/02/03/intl_world/amanpour-didier-francois/ 

A French journalist's ISIS captors cared little about religion, Didier Francois -- who spent over 10 months as the group's prisoner in Syria -- told CNN's Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview.



"There was never really discussion about texts or -- it was not a religious discussion. It was a political discussion."



"It was more hammering what they were believing than teaching us about the Quran. Because it has nothing to do with the Quran."



"We didn't even have the Quran; they didn't want even to give us a Quran."

Here’s What a Man Who Studied Every Suicide Attack in the World Says About ISIS’ Motives: More than anything, the terrorist group’s outward expressions of religious fervor serve its secular objectives of controlling resources and territory: www.thenation.com/article/heres-what-a-man-who-studied-every-suicide-attack-in-the-world-says-about-isiss-motives/ 

Despite the existence of a good deal of research about terrorism, there’s a gap between the common understanding of what leads terrorists to kill and what many experts believe to be true.



Terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are widely seen as being motivated by their radical theology. But according to Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, this view is too simplistic. Pape knows his subject; he and his colleagues have studied every suicide attack in the world since 1980, evaluating over 4,600 in all.



He says that religious fervor is not a motive unto itself. Rather, it serves as a tool for recruitment and a potent means of getting people to overcome their fear of death and natural aversion to killing innocents. “Very often, suicide attackers realize they have instincts for self-preservation that they have to overcome,” and religious beliefs are often part of that process, said Pape in an appearance on my radio show, Politics and Reality Radio, last week. But, Pape adds, there have been “many hundreds of secular suicide attackers,” which suggests that radical theology alone doesn’t explain terrorist attacks. From 1980 until about 2003, the “world leader” in suicide attacks was the Tamil Tigers, a secular Marxist group of Hindu nationalists in Sri Lanka.



According to Pape’s research, underlying the outward expressions of religious fervor, ISIS’s goals, like those of most terrorist groups, are distinctly earthly:



What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common, since 1980, is not religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon and the West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the Paris suicide attacks we’ve just experienced in the last days, military intervention—and specifically when the military intervention is occupying territory—that’s what prompts suicide terrorism more than anything else.

[heyjude]

Hipsters ruin everything.

[summer]

Mar 23, 2016 10:10:44 GMT -5 heyjude said:

Hipsters ruin everything.

Right. Can't even de-radicalize these assholes.