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Monday, March 21, 2016

Former Radicals -- From IRA To Islamists -- United To Become A Force For Peace

From IRA to Islamists, former radicals unite to become a force for peace

 
Once in groups ranging from US white supremacists to Irish nationalists to European Islamists, these ex-extremists have formed a network to support each other as they try to help people avoid the errors they made.

By , Contributor 

LONDON — A former recruiter for a radical Islamist group, Yasmin Mulbocus now spends her days connecting Muslim women to the larger interfaith community in her West London neighborhood.
Her goal? To counter the radical ideology that catapulted her into extremism and to prevent young people, particularly women, from joining jihadi groups.
Ms. Mulbocus expects to get her spirit broken with alarming regularity. With every beheading, suicide bombing, or mass shooting, every time a mosque is vandalized or a Muslim is attacked just for being a Muslim – even Mulbocus’s strong voice shakes a little. “Some days, you just want to give up,” she says.
Recommended: How much do you know about terrorism? Take the quiz.
That’s when she turns to a trusted group whose members share a similar past and common purpose.
These individuals were violent extremists themselves, or, like Mulbocus, were recruiters for radical networks. They run the gamut – from jihadis to white supremacists, street gang members, Irish nationalists, and left-wing extremists.
Today, they have become a force for peace, using their powerful storytelling to deter future radicals. The goal of these partners is to connect former extremists with one another and provide them with technical support and funding for counterextremism efforts in their respective countries and communities.
And while utilizing former extremists in counterterrorism initiatives can be risky for such individuals, who still may be trying to gain stability and acceptance in mainstream society, their networks offer members words of comfort and support to encourage them.
“In the end, the objective is to flood the Internet with narratives that can counter the other side,” says Sasha Havlicek, founder and chief executive officer of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which runs Against Violent Extremism (AVE), the largest international anti-extremist network. “And with each member we bring into the network, there is one less extremist out there.”

The voice of Abdullah-X

AVE’s ranks include some 300 former radicals, among them the creator of a YouTube animated series called “The Abdullah-X Show.” This man, who chooses to remain anonymous for security reasons, counters the arguments of the so-called Islamic State (IS) group through the persona of Abdullah-X, a 20-something Londoner who speaks with a working-class accent on issues such as jihad, Muslim identity, Islamophobia, and terrorism.
Abdullah-X’s creator, who grew up in East London, was a recruiter on college campuses for extremist networks for about 13 years. Today, he lives a double life. As himself, a middle-aged former extremist, he talks face-to-face with youths on campuses telling his story and hearing their grievances. And then he assumes the role of Abdullah-X on YouTube, meticulously crafting and delivering bite-sized messages to the same audience, but as one of them.
He seems to relish this dual existence.
The creator of the Abdullah-X cartoons holds up a cellphone showing the character. 
“Well, I’m not 19 and certainly not as good-looking as Abdullah-X,” he says, smiling. “Some of my own understanding of how extremists recruit and radicalize young people and how they prey on youth is in the narrative of Abdullah-X.”
But Abdullah-X is braver than his creator, he says. “Abdullah-X doesn’t mince words. You can be much ... bolder in animation and cartoons and that’s why it works. Abdullah-X has morphed into something larger than what any of us can be.”
Still, it can be a lonely road, he says, which is where networks like AVE come in. “Counterextremism work is also often a thankless task,” he says. “But you’re not doing the work to be thanked. You’re doing the work because it needs to be done. Having other people around you who share those same ideals can motivate you and can keep you going. I think it’s essential.”

Rallying communities against extremism

Mulbocus, who, like the creator of Abdullah-X, left an extremist group through her own process of critical thinking, says once she got out of that life after the Sept. 11 attacks, she became passionate about rallying her own neighborhood and community against extremism. She has organized “interfaith cafes” where women gather to talk over cake and coffee about issues such as fair trade, the practice of their religion, and violent extremism.
“It’s really about bringing people together and just celebrating the commonalities rather than differences and talking about issues like domestic violence and sexual abuse and posing the question, What can the community at large do?” she says.
These local issues can be a big factor for people who are lured by extremist ideology, Mulbocus says. “If we give them a platform and an alternative, it helps take the heat away from these violent extremist groups that would otherwise prey on these young individuals.”
Her focus is now on the young women from England and other European countries who are traveling to Syria, especially those who managed to escape IS and are now telling their stories.
“When it comes to preventing young women from joining [IS], we need to provide them with that critical thinking,” she says. Radical ideology goes against the teaching of Islam because the whole idea of martyrdom is anchored in personal pride, which the religion forbids, she says.
“Our imams need to be out on the streets teaching true Islam,” she says. “I’ve been trying to get more of them out there talking to young people.”

Former extremists meet with skepticism

For Mulbocus and others like her, this work comes with challenges. Former extremists are often met with skepticism and mistrust in the counterextremism world because of their past actions, says Vidhya Ramalingam, a counterterrorism expert in London. “That’s starting to break down, but we’re not wholly there yet,” she says.
And few who get out of extremism end up as peacebuilders, Ms. Ramalingam adds. “A large number of former extremists just disappear into mainstream society.”
Some experts warn that it is unhealthy for former extremists to remain cemented in that role. “Ideally, they should move on and live normal lives,” says Daniel
Koehler, director of the Berlin-based German Institute on Radicalization and De-radicalization Studies. “Just because you’ve been a neo-Nazi for 15 years or a jihadi for 10 years, it doesn’t make you an expert in de-radicalization.”
It is also important that former extremists get a chance to completely recover before they try to help others, says Brian Levin, director at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. “Not all people who leave extremism end up treating the underlying personal instabilities, be it familial issues, alcoholism, or financial problems, that led them to extremism in the first place.”
Some former radicals argue that counternarratives will not work when it comes to fighting an enemy like IS. “This doesn’t work like an employer-union negotiation,” says Henry Robinson, a former member of the official Irish Republican Army (IRA) who was imprisoned as a young man for kneecapping a member of a rival paramilitary group.
Better, he argues, is for former extremists to flag IS sites and make them unavailable to Web viewers. They “can play a part in that because they know how to identify recruiters, be it online or at the street corner,” he says. “Whether you’re white supremacist, [IS], Al Qaeda, or IRA, when you take away the ideology, they’re all the same.”
Still, the friendship and support Arno Michaelis, a Milwaukee-based former white supremacist, gets from these networks far outweigh the negatives. “There will be head-butting and conflicts” over how to address problems, he says. “But we learn to manage that in a healthy, peaceful manner and that’s an important part of our learning process and evolution.”
They result in unlikely friendships, including Mulbocus’s bond with an American woman who used to be a white supremacist.
“We didn’t want to speak to each other in the beginning,” she says of their initial meeting. “But we laughed when we started talking about how we each thought we were going to take over the White House.
“We realized we were not that different after all.”
• This story was produced with help from the International Women’s Media Foundation through the Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists.

Abdullah-X: Finding a God of mercy, not wrath

The path that the creator of Abdullah-X took at age 16 into extremist networks in London was a natural one for “someone like him.”
“There I was, not happy with the way I looked, with where I was and how I was treated,” he says. “For me, it was about identity and belonging. I wanted revenge from the world because of the way the world treated me.” He wanted to “gain the pleasure of Allah,” and that meant rejecting his parents’ influence, keeping quiet about what he was learning, and slowly taking on a more politicized mantra.
“Eventually, that narrative led me to bring out all the pent-up anger that I had about myself and ... to cast that stone on everyone else.”
His entry into radicalism was swift. Getting back out took much longer, he says.
“I started questioning the motive behind the messaging. I realized I was the member of a religious cult, a glorified gang. And the more I attached myself to a cultish type of understanding, the further away I was getting from a traditional understanding of Islam.”
He says he also got out of extremism by learning to love himself. “I learned to accept how I am, who I am. It was learning that not all Jews and Christians are in some kind of dark alliance to make my life a misery. I was given a vision of Islam where it was wrath, anger, and hate. I had to leave those networks to understand that God’s mercy outweighs His wrath.”

Yasmin Mulbocus: ‘I didn’t want to see them with hate'

At age 17, Yasmin Mulbocus, a child of Guyanese and Afghan parents who had been bounced between foster families for most of her childhood, found her home in a radical Islamist organization in London.
She could relate to their tales of oppression.
“I knew the feeling,” she says. “I was bullied for being dark-skinned. I was physically and sexually abused.” Group members promised her an Islamic nation where food, shelter, and utilities would be free, perpetrators of crimes against women would be brought to justice, and the rift between rich and poor would be bridged.
From 1996 until about 2001, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Ms. Mulbocus was a recruiter for a group that she believed would conquer Washington and hoist its flag atop the White House. She canvassed neighborhoods handing out fliers and urging young women to find solutions to their problems under the “ideal Islamic state.”
But as a young adult, she was so blinded by the possibility of a utopian existence that she didn’t think about how such a plan would be executed. When a family member asked her that question, she had no answer – and realized how naive she had been about the scale of violence needed to realize the dream.
Mulbocus’s moment of reckoning came when she heard her daughter telling someone, “it’s OK to kill non-Muslims.”
“I was just embarrassed, shocked,” Mulbocus says. “What kind of a family structure was I creating? What was happening to my child? The prophet [Muhammad] wasn’t about hate and killing. He was about love and mercy. This wasn’t Islam.”
That’s when she left the group. “I just wanted to be grateful for what I got and the life I had,” she says. “I didn’t want to see my neighbors as different. I didn’t want to see them with hate."

Ex-skinhead: ‘We’re brothers now'

Arno Michaelis was a founding member of a racist skinhead organization in Milwaukee and lead singer of the hate-metal band Centurion, which has sold tens of thousands of albums among neo-Nazi music fans.
His gang was later declared by the Anti-Defamation League as the most violent neo-Nazi skinhead group in the United States. The lyrics he screamed out advocated racial holy war.
“I found the violence truly intoxicating,” Mr. Michaelis says. “Getting drunk and beating up people became a routine part of my life.”
Though he left the movement in 1996 after about seven years, his recruitment messages and violent acts had already inspired many. One of them was Wade Michael Page, who walked into a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., on Aug. 5, 2012, and opened fire, killing six people before he turned the gun on himself.
Among those killed was the father of Pardeep and Amardeep Kaleka. Trying to understand Mr. Page’s motives, Pardeep tracked down Michaelis through Against Violent Extremism.
But what started as a tentative meeting turned into both a friendship and a partnership.
“We’re brothers now,” Michaelis says. “We’re family.”
In the two years since, the pair has worked together within Serve2Unite, an organization founded by the Kaleka brothers to fight violent extremism.
Together, Michaelis and Pardeep have told their stories to more than 12,000 children in the Milwaukee area. “The violence in our communities, it’s our problem,” Michaelis says. “We all need to be a part of that solution, to interrupt that cycle of violence.”

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