Notes about radicalization

 Three links this morning I don't want to lose.

1. Thread by Iyad el-Baghdadi
2. Reply to that thread from Melissa @mkverslon mentioning the backstory of Derek Black and
3. The Terry Gross interview of Frank Schaeffer

I have been aware of Iyad el-Baghdadi for years. He is a Palestinian expat and activist who has lived several places over the years and has never given up his vision for a Palestinian homeland. This video tells more about him than I can describe in words.
His Twitter thread reflections this morning strike me as insightful. 

A confession that I want to approach respectfully (but honestly). When I compare the radicalization story of my (20-year younger) former self to the radicalization stories of people who got sucked into white supremacism, one main difference really surprises me 

What truly surprised me was that while my sense of grievance (as a Palestinian Arab Muslim kid growing up in the Middle East) was based upon real, hard stuff. Meanwhile theirs was based upon "feeling" persecuted. It just seems to me that what broke my psyche was far heavier stuff 

Obviously this is a very personal observation and I could be very wrong. It could be that I'm not empathetic enough with their experiences; or these experiences could be distant. I only intimately know my own story. I'm just putting this out there to see how right or wrong I am 

But interesting to ask this question at scale. Are people who get radicalized due to immense pressure more de-radicalizable than those who get radicalized absent immense pressure? After all if it's immense pressure, the pressure can ease or normalize or counter-balance somehow 

*In 2015 (in the context of ISIS) I noted that people who get radicalized due to "local grievances" (family killed, displaced from homes, property stolen etc) are actually *less* ideological and more de-radicalizable than the foreign fighters who are coming from Western countries 

I don't know anything about Melissa, the Twitter account leaving the Derek Black link, but she is clearly someone who has given a good deal of thought to this subject. I wish I had time to find out more about her but at the moment these notes are my mission.

The Washington Post link is long, illustrating how a young man reared to be a radical extremist eventually discovers how deluded his thinking has been, along with that of his father and the peer group in which he grew up. This is how it ends...

Don [Derek's dad] asked Derek about the theories that had emerged on the Stormfront message thread. Was he just faking a change to have an easier career? Was this his way of rebelling?

When Derek denied those things, Don mentioned the theory he himself had come to believe — the one David Duke had posited in the first hours after Derek’s letter went public: Stockholm syndrome. Derek had become a hostage to liberal academia and then experienced empathy for his captors.

“That’s so patronizing,” Derek remembered saying. “How can I prove this is what I really believe?”

He tried to convince Don for a few hours at the restaurant. He told him about white privilege and repeated the scientific studies about institutionalized racism. He mentioned the great Islamic societies that had developed algebra and predicted a lunar eclipse. He said that now, as he recognized strains of white nationalism spreading into mainstream politics, he felt accountable. “It’s not just that I was wrong. It’s that it caused real damage,” he remembered saying.

“I can’t believe I’m arguing with you, of all people, about racial realities,” Don remembered telling him.

The restaurant was closing, and they were no closer to an understanding. Derek went to sleep at his grandmother’s house. Then he woke up early and started driving across the country alone.

Every day since then, Derek had been working to put distance between himself and his past. He was still living across the country after finishing his master’s degree, and he was starting to learn Arabic to be able to study the history of early Islam. He hadn’t spoken to anyone in white nationalism since his defection, aside from occasional calls home to his parents. Instead, he’d spent his time catching up on aspects of pop culture he’d once been taught to discredit: liberal newspaper columns, rap music and Hollywood movies. He’d come to admire President Obama. He decided to trust the U.S. government. He started drinking tap water. He had taken budget trips to Barcelona, Paris, Dublin, Nicaragua and Morocco, immersing himself in as many cultures as he could.

He joined a new online message group, this one for couch surfers, and he opened up his one-bedroom apartment to strangers looking for a temporary place to stay. It felt increasingly good to trust people — to try to interact without prejudice or judgment — and after a while, Derek began to feel detached from the person he had been.

But then came the election campaign of 2016, and suddenly the white nationalism Derek had been trying to unlearn was the unavoidable subtext to national debates over refugees, immigration, Black Lives Matter and the election itself. Late in August, Derek watched in his apartment as Hillary Clinton gave a major speech about the rise of racism. She explained how white supremacists had rebranded themselves as white nationalists. She referenced Duke and mentioned the concept of a “white genocide,” which Derek had once helped popularize. She talked about how Trump had hired a campaign manager with ties to the alt-right. She said: “A fringe movement has essentially taken over the Republican Party.”

It was the very same point Derek had spent so much of his life believing in, but now it made him feel both fearful for the country and implicated. “It’s scary to know that I helped spread this stuff, and now it’s out there,” he told one of his Shabbat friends.

He also wondered whether he would ever be able to completely detach himself from his past, when so much about it remained public. He was still occasionally recognized as a former racist in graduate school; still written into the will of a man he had befriended through white nationalism; still the godson of Duke; still the son of Chloe and Don.

Late this summer, for the first time in years, he traveled to Florida to see them. At a time of increasingly contentious rhetoric, he wanted to hear what his father had to say. They sat in the house and talked about graduate school and Don’s new German shepherd. But after a while, their conversation turned back to ideology, the topic they had always preferred.

Don, who usually didn’t vote, said he was going to support Trump.

Derek said he had taken an online political quiz, and his views aligned 97 percent with Hillary Clinton’s.

Don said immigration restrictions sounded like a good start.

Derek said he actually believed in more immigration, because he had been studying the social and economic benefits of diversity.

Don thought that would result in a white genocide.

Derek thought race was a false concept anyway.

They sat across from each other, searching for ways to bridge the divide. The bay was one block away. Just across from there was Mar-a-Lago, where Trump had lived and vacationed for so many years, once installing an 80-foot pole for a gigantic American flag.

“Who would have thought he’d be the one to take it mainstream?” Don said, and in a moment of so much division, it was the one point on which they agreed.

The Terry Gross interview is self-explanatory and straightforward. It was in 2008 and the link remains active so I don't feel the need to drop quotes here.