The Holy Father insists that economic inequality and poverty are the breeding grounds for the radicalization which leads to terrorism. The evidence clearly does not support the Papal paradigm.
Rather, youth, wealth, and a full-time education are risk factors associated with violent radicalization, according to a British study released Wednesday. The research challenges commonly-held notions in the West of what makes an individual prone to sympathizing with terrorist acts.
Researchers from Queen Mary University in London surveyed more than 600 men and women of Muslim heritage living in London and Bradford to assess their sympathy or condemnation for 16 different actions that are broadly defined as “terrorism,” such as the use of suicide bombs "to fight injustice," for example.
Most experts suggest that radicalization is a staged process that begins with a pre-radicalization phase, marked by the onset of sympathetic feelings towards violent acts. The study focused on those sentiments, which might make an individual particularly vulnerable to persuasion by extremists who seek recruits.
“We’re offering a new model for sympathies as an early phase of radicalization that can be measured,” Kamaldeep Bhui, the study's lead author and a cultural psychology professor at the university, said.
While just 2.4 % of people expressed some sympathy for violence overall, researchers found that those under the age 20, those in full-time education rather than employment, and those with annual incomes above $125,000 were more prone to express sympathy for violent protests and "terrorism."
“One explanation for homegrown terrorism in high-income countries is that it’s about inequality-related grievances," Bhui said in a phone interview. "We were surprised that the inequality paradigm seems not to be supported. The study essentially seemed to show that those born in the U.K. consistent with the radicalization paradigm are actually more affluent or well off.”
Two other findings stood in conflict with prevailing stereotypes about so-called homegrown terrorism in the West: Immigrants and those who speak a non-English language at home, as well as those who reported suffering from anxiety or depression, were less likely to express sympathy for terrorist acts.
The Queen Mary team hopes its findings better inform early intervention and preventative counterterrorism strategy.
“Once terrorists are captured, there is often debate about what motivated their behavior,” Bhui said. “Whether they came from disadvantaged backgrounds, have mental health issues or a criminal record, and whether their acts were purely political. Characteristics identified during interrogation are uncritically assumed to be of relevance to the early phase of radicalization.”
Increasingly, the perpetrators of high-profile terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe are not foreign operatives but citizens who worked or were educated in the countries they attack. Dzhokar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston marathon terrorists who murdered three people, both fit that profile. Two British Muslim converts were sentenced last month for the brutal killing of a British soldier. And many are “lone wolves” with few ties to other extremists and no history of criminal behavior. Terry Lee Loewen, who allegedly plotted to detonate a bomb in the Wichita, Kansas airport, is yet another example.
The U.S. intelligence community has begun to recognize that its counterterrorism strategy is ill-equipped to predict attackers who do not fit their traditional paradigms. “Law enforcement activities directed solely against an individual’s illegal activity after radicalization likely start too late and do not provide a sufficient answer to the complex phenomenon of homegrown Islamist terrorism," said a 2011 FBI report titled “The Evolution of Terrorism since 9/11.”
The common threads running through many acts of violent radicalism in countries like the U.K. or U.S. are a sense of isolation and a desire to find a more potent identity, Bhui said. Many of these links have been studied anecdotally, he said, but they have not previously been supported by empirical evidence.
The apparent correlation between being a student and being prone to radicalism is one example. “There’s been a lot of concern about university campuses being hotbeds of violent radicalization, or at least that’s how it’s described in the newspapers,” Bhui noted. “It could be that education is a transitional phase and young people are trying to identify with another way of thinking. When people are undergoing education, they are vulnerable to all sorts of influences.”
Is it little wonder, then, when the Church has lost its influence in the world that impressionable minds would find in Islam an ideology so overwhelmingly accepted and rigorously observed in the world today?
It would appear that the Church shares in the responsibility for the raise of radical terrorism in its failure to proclaim the Gospel in a meaningful and inspirational way to the world.
Pope Francis needs to inform himself of the dynamic of radicalization and begin to address its root causes. Our young people are awash in a sea of secularism and materialism which promises little other than disappointment and despair. The Church does not speak to them and offers them no light out of the darkness. This is the disillusionment which begets radicalization and terror.
No comments:
Post a Comment