How a Danish Town Helped Young Muslims Turn Away from ISIS
npr.org
npr.org
This paragraph jumped out at me because of the numbers involved:
"Starting in 2012, 34 people went from Aarhus to Syria. As far as the police know, six were killed and 10 are still over there. Of the 18 who came back home, all showed up in Aarslev and Link's office, as did hundreds of other potential radicals in Aarhus — about 330 in total."
If a small town like Aarhus harboured 34 people that joined ISIS and 330 potential radicals in total that does not bode well for the rest of Western Europe.
Those numbers, when extrapolated make the problem a lot larger than I thought it was (and I actually thought I was over-estimating).
Aarhus has a population of only ~320K, so that's 1:1000.
About 250 Americans have tried to join ISIS, says the FBI. That's about 1 in a million for the US. Around 100 made it to the battle zone. NBC has a profile of 15 of them.[1]
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-uncovered/americans-15...
It has much to do with how people integrated into Europe v America.
Europe is very difficult to integrated into - they are ethnic groups. You can mostly 'become American' but it's almost impossible to 'become Danish' unless you are there from a very early age.
Americans in particular have a hard time with this, because they don't 'see' ethnicity, and often use the term 'race' which is the wrong term to describe groups. 'Race' is genetics, not particularly meaningful. Ethnicity is a set of values, behaviours, cultural norms, i.e. attitudes towards, family, government, education, religion, etc. etc..
Most nations outside the Americas are simply formalized governments of ethnic groups.
An American passport pretty much makes you American. A Danish passport makes you a Danish citizen, but not necessarily Danish.
Also - Europeans are more intellectually open minded, but more behaviourally cloistered, whereas Americans are sometimes a little less intellectually open (i.e. popular ideas, policies), but in practical reality, almost always more 'open'. Euros talk benevolence but hang out with their own kind. Americans sometimes talk anti-immigration, but they are pretty fluid in terms of social and business relationships.
Integration into an EU country is harder for another reason as well: America is founded on immigration, everybody - even if you may have to go back a few generations - is from somewhere else. In Europe that really isn't the case, people's origins are usually 'over the horizon', lost in the time before record keeping.
So in America you don't easily stand out as a stranger. This is compounded by the fact that in America it is fairly normal to relocate for work, whereas in Europe that is much more rare (but becoming more normal). Ironically, that is one of the main drivers behind the whole 'brexit' thing.
There's the Atlantic Ocean between the USA and the Middle East/North Africa, so they can be a lot more picky about who they choose to let in.
You 're right however, cultural barriers are high in europe, even for EU immigrants. Europe should have thought twice before carelessly declaring an open immigration policy.
That oversimplifies a bit. You do not simply walk in a well adjusted individual and walk out a radical.
If you check the background of all the people mentioned, i bet you that you will find history involving social services, trouble at school, possibly a rap sheet.
Again and again, no matter if a person is muslim, christian, or something else entirely, the common denominator is that they feel themselves not fitting in with the society around them.
Having a different skin color, being ostracized by society for whatever reason, ignored by the girls the media suggest they should be interested in, it's not easy being a young male in any society.
We used to have military service but that path is not without problems of its own.
They are related but it would be wrong to equate them.
One is an ideological movement with leaders, propaganda, formalized groups, $$$$, ethnic orientation and nationalism etc..
It would be like saying the Nazis were just a bunch of angry men. Obviously, they were that, but it wasn't the primary driver. ISIS, radical Salafism/Wahhabism etc. are organized forces.
Nothing easier than giving a frustrated young kid a sense of purpose and a way to make a name for themselves. Their background makes that even easier because they already perceive (quite often rightly so) that the deck is stacked against them.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_refugee_p...
"Than most nations on Earth" is probably right though, but it's a bit of a weird metric because Denmark is more affluent than 'most nations on Earth' and also part of Europe, which tends to absorb a relatively large number of refugees when compared to other parts of the world.
So it would be better to compare Denmark with the countries surrounding it.
Remember how the West had a problem with...
The Taliban... then Al-Qaeda...... then ISIS.......... then ??
The names are changing but something else remains constant or is getting worse.
This will continue until weapons need to be sold. Military Industrial complex is a thing and it needs blood to lubricate its wheels.
Syrians (and Saudis) who joined the insurgency in Iraq weren't disenfranchised infact they were from the elite, often dropping out of university to go and join the "cause". Osama Bin Laden who founded AQ was born into one of the richest families in the world, had higher education and really had no hard done to him by anyone.
Europeans who join ISIS are mostly 2nd and 3rd generation "immigrants", often to mixed families and "fresh converts", they aren't particularly disenfranchised either.
Geopolitics and economics do have a role in conflicts everywhere, but the sooner you stop blaming everything on people being poor, oppressed and "western expansionism" the sooner we might actually be able to start working on a solution.
Last time I've checked Tibet is effectively poorer than Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, not to mention the smaller gulf states (and I'm not counting the average which is skewed because of how the wealth is distributed) and it's quite objectively oppressed but I have yet to see Tibetans blowing up restaurants in China.
Here is a formal example of what I mean:
http://i.imgur.com/r3bom1c.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Qen8lBA.png
While some of this is hilariously old fashioned or historical period specific, it is also interesting just how many traits are consistent enough that we recognize them centuries later.
This could be astrology or tea leaf reading, but I think it merits a genuine scientific investigation. It may be anecdotal but far too many people agree the Italians are very fond of chatting, including the Italians.
All of this is to say, while it is true that Islam is dominant in countries where periodic religious warfare breaks out, it is possibly Islam is derived from collective temperament and not the other way around. It should definitely be treated seriously as a hypothesis.
That's an enormous amount of _potential_ harm even with low tech attacks like knives in crowds.
Not being sarcastic downvoter! I really want to know.
He has killed far more than Daesh can ever hope to.
The Iraq invasion was a major debacle as well. A functioning state (although a hostile one to the US) was invaded and it's societal structures torn down.
A power vaccum in Iraq and civil war in a neighboring country were the perfect ingredients for a despicable "organization" like Daesh to be formed.
check: does this include arming of dissidents by foreign powers?
> Assad was an imposed ruler. The kept growing in power until he felt he could equate himself with God.
check: need just /one/ citation for this assertion.
> He has killed far more than Daesh can ever hope to.
check: need just /one/ citation for this assertion.
He succeeded his father, and his father was one of the original coup members:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963_Syrian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
Quite a messy page in history, I don't think it is fair to say he was 'imposed'.
> He has killed far more than Daesh can ever hope to.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/islamic-state-has-kille...
Hope that works for you.
Humanity does not have a very good track record when it comes to learning from the past, so we are set to repeat history a couple of more times before we get it right. Let's hope I'm wrong about this, but the rate at which all the stable parts of the world are de-stabilizing is uncanny.
People keep pointing to studies that prove that the world is becoming less violent but I'm reminded of the sailors proverb that a real storm is preceded by a sense of calm.
I'll take what science says over what the media hype is any day.
But there is a ton of evidence that the foundations of many societies are shifting and not for the better. That doesn't immediately reflect in the statistics (death tolls, crime rates) until a certain critical mass has been reached.
Just like you can't tell a tsunami from a small wave visually until it reaches the shore.
There isn't a country in Europe that has not moved substantially towards nationalism in the last decade or so. The foundations of Europe are being attacked and countries that were relatively stable (Turkey, Greece, Spain, UK) are all facing internal forces strong enough to change those countries in substantial ways. Then there is Ukraine (which is far from over) and Syria.
All in all, 'science' is in this case mostly tallying up the dead a couple of years after the bodies hit the ground. It's lagging behind the curve considerably and it doesn't even log places like Iraq and Syria in those statistics because they are anomalies.
Of course, I'm an American, so I don't see nationalism as a dirty word. You're supposed to be proud of your country and support it first and foremost.
If that doesn't come at someone else's expense, then maybe yes.
But 'nationalism' to me equates with stupidity. Putting a flag and other symbols above reason, supporting the troops, even when they're committing war crimes and so on.
Nationalism is a dirty word in Europe for a reason, every time it rears its ugly head we have another war to deal with.
America is lucky in that sense, it has only had two wars on its own soil (if you count the Canadian incursion), and none of those were because of foreign invaders (if you ignore the position of the Native Americans), and none of those in recent times.
But imagine if America had been the stage of WWI and WWII, I wonder how you'd feel about nationalism if that had been the case.
War is cheap if you export it, very very expensive to import. The scars of WWI and WWII still run very deep through Europe, it doesn't take any effort at all to find them, even if all for WWI and most of those that took part in WWII are now dead.
If you look at most metrics normalized over the whole Earth, yes we are in an unprecedented era of peace, and we should be thankful. There are issues and there is room to grow. Daesh is an example of forces that threaten to unravel that peace, but are we going to kid ourselves into thinking that Daesh is anything like the beginning of the twentieth century? Let's not fall into recentism and forget what we learned in world history.
When it comes to values/nationalism and such, I think it sounds like your argument then is there is a potential for the reversal of such trends and I agree. But it's discussions like this that hopefully will keep us from repeating the mistakes we make in the 10's or 30's. We are live actors and we have a chance to change things for the better. You can tell that I'm pretty much an optimist.
But the last 10 years have slowly but surely made me wonder if we're really as stupid as it seems that we are.
Just some samples: A couple of days ago there was an article about Duerte here on HN, the newly minted presidente of the Philippines. Whose primary solution to everything seems to be a well placed bullet, oh, and never mind a couple of rapes, as long as he's the first one in line.
In the UK, we have a bit of a situation at the moment, with lines being drawn at the level of 'we reserve the right to kick out your citizens' or to use them as bargaining chips. Northern Ireland and Scotland may break away from the UK, or they end up leaving the EU. Either way, that's bad news for a very large number of people. As an immediate result of that violence against people of other races (even the ones that have been in the UK for many generations) or from different nationalities is up to levels unprecedented for many many years (decades).
In NL, Belgium, France and Hungary we have nationalist movements that would all love to destabilize the EU further for personal gain and never mind the consequences. Power hungry 'strong men' (and some women) are in vogue all over, and people lap it up, using their words as covert signals to engage in violence and open hostility.
Then there was a coup in Turkey, and the displacement of very large numbers of people in Syria with all the associated misery (and death toll).
Note that none of this is about 'terrorism', I fully agree that statistically it is - for now, and let's hope it stays that way - insignificant.
For instance, terrorism works when its actions are published for the more people to see as possible. Statistically you have more probabilities of chocking to death on your breakfast or slipping in the shower than dying from a terrorist action in Europe/US.
Rational thought is on the backseat... So hence the pessimism and thoughts that something bad is comming.
Please take a look at this: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
Acts of terror (the number of them) follow an exponential curve culminating in civil conflict. The objective of terror isn't to kill large numbers of enemies, it is to stress society into dragging one faction into battling the other.
That is why you should be more worried about terrorism than slippery showers. It scales differently. Violence is a contagion.
People's intuitions about this are actually correct. Bear in mind I dislike both the media and democracy! Sometimes what the 'man in the street' thinks is more accurate than an expert opinion, and that is because intuition is more holistic than a collection of expert opinions in specific fields conjoined together.
I already acknowledged that so there is no need to make that point again and again.
Also, I am 26 this year, so I will probably have to deal with the ramifications of whatever happens today for longer than many who are deciding will. One would think that would be more reason for me to be even more fearful then but the way I see it is that it pushes me even more to be optimistic for my future, because I have more to lose. Plus, the stereotype that goes with youth and over-optimism, etc.
You can run counterfactuals but you can't run experiments on history.
By studying history you can discover recurring patterns but these are more like heuristics than laws of nature.
Did you know that Germany had a similar reproduction problem pre-1914?
It was also held to be the most civilized culture in Europe at the time.
Or that France was the strongest nation before the Revolution? This was before a financial crisis and failed harvests tipped the balance suddenly.
Point is that when things go tits up it is always less than obvious to the people involved. Even when you find evidence of 'cracks' developing that led up to that situation, they hold little predictive power when discovered in other situations.
Consider this prediction for example.
Right now France is receiving the brunt of attacks by Islamic extremists. Logically any public outcry and counter-reaction should start there, yes?
But I think it is actually more likely in Germany, Holland or Denmark because of national psychology. They tend to go one way, or the other, you should know the Germans don't do half measures.
Can I measure that scientifically? Hell no. I'd still put money down on it.
Some answers aren't considered acceptable merely because they aren't convenient. Well, truth doesn't have to be.
Despite being NRx and other esoteric political affiliations associated with the right, I cannot call myself a nationalist for the reason you described. We lost too many of the best in the world wars and I don't think our European society has recovered even now.
I hope for an improved complex, something post-nationalism which can solve for systemic threats without the costs of meat grinder-like machine wars swallowing up the population. Nuclear weapons have solved for most inter-state conflict but internal sectarian conflict is far from solved and is in future extremely likely in my view, most obviously between Islam and westerners in the home countries.
Imagine this: You go to a foreign country or are raised in a foreign culture (because things in your own country are horrible at the moment). You feel mistreated (even though they provide you with asylum and quite literally save your life and provide you with all you need), for example in a job or at school. This makes you feel like you have to kill people to make your point, and you have to be a terrorist, so you set out to wage this war. This is utter lunacy. This is not the spark for terrorism - a careless upbringing without proper values and with extremist ideologies is. Let me tell you something: Culture matters. A lot. Not race and not birthplace. But what you believe to be moral and true fundamentally shapes not only how you view the world but how you interact with it. What we need is moral education, a reform (enlightenment) in muslim culture and stop being apologist by blaming ourselves.
Moreover, it's not like the Muslim parents wanted their children to go wage Jihad on the west. Once again, we see in this case the radicalization happens outside the mosque amongst splinter groups, so asking that "Muslim culture" have a cultural shift is the wrong place to ask for change given that the kids didn't want to follow "the old guys" in the mosque anyway.
Not that influences from the Mosque wouldn't help, and I don't know if these Mosque leaders helped or hurt but my impression from the story is that they were rebelled against too.
That doesn't give you an excuse to kill 100 random strangers!
It is their culture that causes this, as they have a loud group that constantly calls for these massacres and generally very few of them speak up against this loud group of fanatics.
We don't have anything like that in our culture, that's why it's so rare that somebody from us ends up mass murdering 100 random persons.
If someone from us tried calling for mass murdering some minority he'll actually be locked up in no time and attacked harshly by the media. That's how we effectively deal with our radicals.
I'm tired of all these attempts to appease members of this culture as it is clearly a much worse culture than ours and they could actually learn something from us.
Where ever Muslims are the majority you always see the same result: Poverty, cruel law system, oppression, massacre and often civil war
And somehow no one seems to be willing to accept that this is the direct result of their value system and their culture.
How are they ever going to improve their societies if we help their fanatics to keep oppressing dissenters by constantly repeating that their culture is great and everything's fine?
Edit: And because I'm sure someone will state that this is unfair because we constantly meddle in their affairs: We also constantly meddle in Russian, Chinese, Indian, Japanese and EU affairs and vice versa.
Still these societies seem to be sufficiently resilient to not collapse in mass murder and total chaos.
Muslim societies constantly collapsed when Socialism was en vogue 50 years ago same as they collapse today with Islamism. You can promote any -Ism you want there, nothing will change as long as the oppressive nature of their culture doesn't change.
The USA has something endemic in their culture which results in toddlers killing more people that terrorists have in their country this year.
People in other countries without this same culture try telling the US how that can stop it by trying the same things that worked in their own countries but keep being told to go away, there is nothing wrong and to mind their own business.
> We also constantly meddle in Russian, Chinese, Indian, Japanese and EU affairs and vice versa. Still these societies seem to be sufficiently resilient to not collapse in mass murder and total chaos.
Does the US 'meddle' in those countries to the extent of placing troops on the ground within their borders in order to shoot at citizens of said country? Does the US conduct drone strikes against people of those countries?
Every society that gives it's citizens the right to bear arms will have accidents. I also doubt that toddlers will have killed more persons than terrorists this year.
> Does the US 'meddle' in those countries to the extent of placing troops on the ground within their borders in order to shoot at citizens of said country? Does the US conduct drone strikes against people of those countries?
Today the West does so in the Middle East, but there is also a real threat to us. 30-50 years ago it wasn't so and there were few soldiers placed in these countries, except for Saudi Arabia because they are apparently incapable of upholding their fine system without Western help. Still their countries were a total mess like they are to this day.
Of course there was meddling and certain groups were supported like the West always does everywhere. But what those groups did with that support in terms of cruelty when compared to other cultures is not comparable.
I guarantee you this, if every country stopped meddling in the Middle East first thing they would do is getting weapons of mass destruction and then they'd proceed to annihilate each other.
They are doing good work. This all fits with everything I have ever read about how to undermine extremism, radicalization, etc. Time does not tend to heal such wounds. It tends to make them fester. That doesn't mean they cannot be healed.
I think it comes down to motivation. If a criminal is say like a sadist rapist, giving him a hug after he rapes will just embolden him to commit more crime. That's because his motivations are due to internal forces/perversions. However, if someone is motivated like Jamal due to discrimination, the thing he wanted in the first place was acceptance, so accepting him leaves him with no reason to commit crime.
Unfortunately, you can't read inside someone's head. Some people just want to be a Jihadist. Some want to see blood and kill. Some just want to belong. I think the best thing to do is to do both...help those who want to be helped and reach those who could be reached, and fight vehemently those who simply want glory or want to get their kicks. How do you know when or when not for this or that case? I guess you pay investigators a nice salary to figure that out because blanket policy is only so effective.
First, he reached out to him with his own agenda. Naturally, having been crapped on by so many people, the young man was suspicious. So, he apologized specifically for the role his own department had played in the ongoing tragedy of this guy's life. He did not just say "Sorry your life sucks." He distanced himself from the wrongdoing of the officers the guy had previously interacted with, showed that his agenda was not harmful, it was a good faith agenda.
Then he hooked him up with a role model who could provide social proof that there was real hope that this could be resolved. He gave him a model for how to solve. He gave him an attractive alternative to becoming a terrorist. The young man did not previously have an attractive alternative.
The article seriously simplified the process. Since this unit is successful in what it does, presumably they are more informed about the various pieces of this than whoever wrote the article.
The forgive and forget model does not work. But this kid was turning bad largely due to bad things happening to him. He was mistreated by the police the first time. His pissed off remark at school should have never turned into so much trouble for him. To some extent, his second contact with the police redressed this wrong. The apology was not just empty words.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/07/isi...
https://www.rt.com/uk/184212-british-mother-isis-christians/
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/us.government.unable.t...
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/23/world/isis-luring-westerne...
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/25/world/isis-western-recruit...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/why-are-so-many-we...
I am not a fan of religion. I am a fan of social psychology and peace studies. I think religion was the world's earliest attempts to record social wisdom, before it could be properly studied.
------ 9:29. Fight against those who believe not in Allah, nor in the Last Day, nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth (i.e. Islam) among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued. ------
Generally I experience that wanting the world to be a certain way does not necessarily make it so. The act of judging Islam, does not necessarily transform it, or its followers. To sway people, you have to understand how they are swayed. I do not discount that some might be swayed by criticism, threat or use of force (i.e. dealing with potential extremists), but these are not necessarily the actions that have the best outcome. I think the "Aarhus model" is interesting in so far as that the officers involved seem to be pragmatical: hey, if we do this, then, in our experience and according to this science, we might very well achieve this certain desired outcome. So let's debate if that is true - instead of getting into this tiresome debate about how people need to be more negative about islam, which in no way I can ascertain contributes to change.
I do not believe in the "debate model of change": that people change when they "lose" a debate, and therefore we must all be voracious in our judgment of those people. The model seems to say: if only the entire western world voiced, in harmonic unison, this grand thesis that Islam itself is the problem, by sheer force of this combined act of judgment, the Islamic world would think "dude, I really think these people are on to something. They are right" and cast off their shackles and their cultural heritage. In fact, I find the model frightening because it says: "unless you join me in disparaging another people's culture, you are part of the problem". Which makes it impossible to have a debate on how to engage with people, because somehow engaging with them is seen as appeasement or agreeing with them (I can empathize with someone I do not agree with). Which limits the options we have in pragmatically working on changing our world: by engaging those people that are problematic, trying to find out why they think a certain way, and intervene in a way that maximises effect.
"In order to be involved in, or be a guide to, the transforming of the present into the future state - the essence of our work - one must have the skill to do this in such a way that the object with which one is working is not violated, but is transformed according its own laws" - Kaplan
EDITED to add: If I interpret you correctly, your argument is that these youngsters are not radicalized, because islam itself is radical, so "radicalized muslim" is a pleonasm of sorts. This is a flawed argument because it can not explain why some Muslims commit to violent action while others do not (reminder, there are hundreds of millions of muslims). For any productive discussion on change to take place, one will have to try and find the x here: "follower of islam + x = commits to violence". I do not know what exactly the x is, but I call people where x exists radicalized.
Yes, if only our generation had someone like that running for president in the US.
So if you hug a terrorist, he might not want to kill you as much, maybe.
You know who doesn't have this terrorist hugging problem?
Japan.
That's what I thought!
edit: It's a (bad) joke.
Funny, Japan doesn't have a terrorism problem.