A Public Health Approach to Violent Radicalism

By Sid Balman Jr. and Shaykh Siddiqi

It’s hard to imagine two more different people than Brenton Tarrant, the Australian extremist who recently killed 50 Muslims in New Zealand, and Hoda Muthana, the American-born Yemeni woman from Alabama seeking repatriation after defecting from ISIS in Syria with her infant son.

 But peel back the surface of their vastly different personal narratives to reveal thatthey are both radicalized, following a twisted, well-worn emotional path to classic radicalization. Ironic, indeed, that violent right-wing extremists and their Muslim mirror images share anything. But countering the phenomenon of violent radicalization and dealing with those who have answered its siren-call will be a fool’s errand until this viewpoint is accepted as the true common denominator around which governments build effective prevention and rehabilitation equations.  

The maximum-security prison outside Pristina in the disputed Balkan nation of Kosovo might be considered ground zero for such an undertaking. The task falls to Rasim Selmani, the progressive warden at this gleaming new facility, and he graciously spent a morning explaining the difficulties of extremist rehabilitation during a visit 18 months ago to explore ways in which his strategies might be adopted by Western governments.  

Kosovo and neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina are struggling to manage returning fighters, and family members of dead Jihadists who are returning to the Balkans, particularly women. The numbers are not huge––no more than a few hundred in each nation––and they are sentenced to prison terms of three to 15 years. As a result of sentencing guidelines, most returnees spend up to three years in prison, and in many cases, they consider it a rite of passage. To make matters even more complex, a recent survey by the Justice Department’s International Criminal Investigative Training Program found that 60 percent of Bosnian communities reject the reintegration of foreign fighters. 

Selmani and many experts view radicalization as a public health problem, with primary, secondary and tertiary symptoms that should be treated with primary, secondary and tertiary measures. It all starts with diagnosing community resiliency and identifying factors that might contribute to unrest among community members, which could eventually trigger violent acts in certain types of individuals.For example, an economically strapped neighborhood might express frustration with the lack of funding for youth sports programs compared to more prosperous areas of a city. But if one digs below the surface––employing opinion research techniques, social media sentiment analysis, heat mapping and other tools––there may lurk seeds of larger problems stemming from feelings of disenfranchisement, disrespect, injustice and discrimination. Addressing the underlying problems with solutions that respond to these symptoms may be the key to community health and mitigating violent extremism.  

Those factors can be a toxic stimulant for individuals vulnerable to radicalization: loners who may have been bullied or suffer from some form of physical or emotional handicap and spend most of their free time on the Web playing violent shooter-survivor games, surfing porn sites and interacting with strangers in the dark corners of hidden chat rooms. They are sitting ducks for extremist recruiters, expert predators who prey on them with tried-and-true brainwashing techniques that eventually compel them to violence, or, in the case of Hoda Muthana, to leave a safe life in Alabama for the illusion of paradise amid the primeval brutality of ISIS in war-torn Syria. 

There is a convergence of views on these issues and solutions between Selmani, and Mike Pannek, a former U.S. Marine who discussed his work heading the Justice Department’s programs with the Balkan prison system, but up to this point their theories remain largely unproven. Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and his national security secretary, Shpen Trdevaj, are supporters of innovative approaches to address radicalized and violent extremists. But within reason, they explained during subsequent meetings in Pristina, recognizing the political and security realities they, and their counterparts globally, must balance to protect their nations and to satisfy diverse constituencies. 

The Obama administration leaned in that direction, providing funding for programs to counter threats from home-grown, right-wing extremists and from foreign groups such as ISIS and Al Qa’ida. But the Trump administration gutted those programs, including a promising initiative at the Department of Homeland Security, a decision many former DHS officials say was taken due to the views of the president and his political base. 

But working with potentially at-risk communities––barring the slim chance of an informant or finding a needle in the haystack of the world wide web––is a long-term proposition that does little to stop the fully radicalized lone wolf and prevent another tragedy like the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, the Bataclan Theater in Paris or the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch. 

While little is known about Muthana, other than her devotion to Islam, near-obsession with privacy and abstemiousness about contact with men, Tarrant’s 74-page manifesto and accounts from acquaintances reveal a classic case of a fully radicalized individual. Tarant was a class clown, loner and poor student, who, according to his manifesto, “barely achiev(ed) a passing grade,” and cashed in on crypto currency to roam the world the past two years. He was obsessed with “white genocide” at the hand of “Islamic slavers,” saw President Trump as a “symbol of renewed white identity,” admired recent perpetrators of mass shootings in Norway and South Carolina, obsessed with the online games Fortnite and Spyro the Dragon, and deluded into imagining that he was once a U.S. Navy Seal with 300 confirmed kills.  

Tarant, and possibly Muthana, will end up in prison, where corrections officials are caught on the horns of a dilemma: do they attempt to rehabilitate them and run the risk of radicalizing fellow inmates, or do they isolate them in solitary to fester with radicalized resentment? And this question has taken on increasing relevance in recent days with strong indications that the terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka were linked to the ISIS diaspora from Syria. 

But there is an alternative: develop programs that incorporate people and institutions with a track record of public service from within at-risk communities. Whether Muslim or far-right, they revere their country as much as their faith and understand through their own personal experiences why people become radicalized. They have “street-cred” that will resonate, and know how to deconstruct the negative narratives that can be built on twisted interpretations of Islam or other philosophies. Law enforcement has a critical role to play, but treating the plague of violent radicalism involves much more than first responders. 

Sid Balman is a specialist in behavior-change communications and author of “Seventh Flag,” historical fiction about the radicalization of the West since World War II. Shaykh Siddiqi, founder of Hijaz College in the United Kingdom, is the Blessed Guide of the Naqshbandi Hijazi Sufi Order