Well of course it isn’t as simple
as that -its about the wider community and environment, which then leads to the ability of individuals to groom others and create a ground for extremism to spread. Which starts at the community level and calling out and removing low level generalisation and “othering” of communities.
No not saying “terrorism is scary” - that would be silly, but for example - people in a European community going around saying “oh Muslims are terrorists” or “Islam and Hamas are the same thing” then more people in the community start agreeing with that person and think “yeah you’re right - I don’t really feel comfortable around them” then people within the community without thinking about it start to isolate Muslims, perhaps young Muslims feel ashamed and struggle with their identity, they feel “othered” from their current society - it creates vulnerability and then someone with horrible intentions comes along and says “you don’t have to put up with that, why don’t to listen to some of my things I think it would help you” then a young person starts to be radicalised. It’s a process that takes years of course.
Its’s the first step of the cycle, take for example, Iraq, and the creation of ISIS. So as I’ve mentioned before, in Iraq we have important tribal and religious structures - so America invaded and dismantled the previous governance structure (which favoured the Sunni minority under Saddam) - now with considerable support from America and their allies, a Shia majority governance structure was put in place. In a governorate called Anbar, which was already quite poor and lacking services, ISIS were able to take considerable control by capitalising on discrimination and marginalisation of the Sunni minority. Many Sunni’s faced discrimination on some sectors of Iraq as kind of “pay back” for the way Saddam treated people during his reign, they did not have access to basic services, they were marginalised, and “othered” by a lot of Shia majority (who themselves had been massively discriminated against under Saddam’s regime) they were fed up of being treated badly and were vulnerable- and a fertile ground was created for someone to come along with false promises, to tell them “if you follow me we can protect your family, we can make sure you have money, we can make sure those people who have been blaming you can’t do this anymore” and then over time ISIS leaders were able to groom and basically brainwash vulnerable Iraqis and others to thinking they were the only ones who could make things better for them.
So as I mentioned in my previous post, if we can take away and stop that initial step, of “othering” by being inclusive with our language, making sure minorities are included in society - it can go a long way to removing the building blocks of extremism. And the generalised comments about Islam, while on their own probably seem really silly to us, they can build and build to create these levels of discrimination - so at the basic community level we can all take actions to call out these generalised comments to stop the process before it starts.