NYPD Report: Potential Terrorists Like Chatting Online, Hanging OutThe New York Police Department deserves a lot of credit for trying to think through the conditions that turn someone into a jihadist, a task that suffers from lazy assumptions and insufficient empirical rigor. What its report on potential radicalization of U.S. Muslims suggests, though, is that determining patterns of behavior that indicate future terrorism is a frustrating and complex task. As a result, most of what we learn about potential homegrown jihadists is that their pre-radical behavior is… a lot like that of non-jihadists.
Contrary to its billing, the report doesn’t identify actual Muslim population clusters in the U.S. that incline toward terrorism. Instead, NYPD intelligence analysts Arvin Bhatt and Mitch Silber try to construct a model, based on prominent European Muslim and U.S. Muslim terrorists and would-be terrorists, that isolates patterns indicating radicalization. They ultimately come up with a four-stage process: pre-radicalization; self-identification with jihadism; indoctrination following exposure to jihadist literature or arguments; and, finally, “jihadization.” They usefully point out that most western al-Qaeda adherents aren’t responding to directly-experienced deprivation or oppression, but are rather aggrieved middle-class men under the grip of ideology. (You can read the whole report here.)
Each step adequately describes the road taken by the extremists profiled by Bhatt and Silber. But that’s largely because the process is itself a generic description of the process of joining any identity-oriented group. al-Qaeda adherents or al-Qaeda-inspired radicals are a maddeningly diverse bunch, extending in background from former high-tech engineers to Mary Kay cosmetics representatives to former metalheads. They can be second-generation U.S. or European Muslims, or converts.
As a result, describing patterns of “pre-jihadist” behavior inclines towards the generic, making it difficult to know what to do with the information. In a discussion of radical “incubators,” for example, there’s this:
These incubators serve as radicalizing agents for those who choose to pursue radicalization. They become their pit stops, “hangouts” and meeting places. Generally these locations, which together comprise the radical subculture of a community, are rife with extremist rhetoric. Though the locations can be mosques, more likely incubators include cafes, cab driver hangouts, flophouses, prisons, student associations, non-governmental organizations, hookah (water pipe) bars, butcher shops and bookstores. …
The internet, with its thousands of extremist websites and chat-rooms, is a virtual incubator of its own. In fact, many of the extremists began their radical conversion while researching or just surfing in the cyber world.
That’s not wrong. But it includes a lot of behavior that doesn’t have anything to do with jihadism. And there the report concedes that finding just who is prone to pursue radicalization isn’t something law enforcement can really do:
There is no useful profile to assist law enforcement or intelligence to predict who will follow this trajectory of radicalization. Rather, the individuals who take this course will begin as “unremarkable” from various walks of life.
As a result, it’s hard to know what kind of action law enforcement can pursue here, short of monitoring every Muslim who hangs out at a hookah bar or has an internet connection. The report stops at calling it a “challenge” to figure out how “to identify, pre-empt and thus prevent homegrown terrorist attacks given the non-criminal element of its indicators.” We may learn more next month: Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) said in a statement today that he intends to hold hearings in September of his Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on today’s “breakthrough” report.
