Given the rather dismal quality of reporting on the ICSR's recently released paper Countering Online Radicalisation I thought it appropriate to present one brief excerpt, which gets right at the heart of the debate.
In September 2008, a sixteen-year-old teenager from Dewsbury, Hamaad Munshi, was found guilty of possessing materials that were likely to be used in acts of terrorism. Labelled ‘Britain’s youngest terrorist’ by the press,26 Munshi collected instructions for making napalm, high explosives and suicide vests, and was a member of a British group of ‘online jihadists’ who regularly shared extremist videos and spent hours discussing their plans to travel to Pakistan and die as ‘martyrs’.Much of Munshi’s extremist activism took place online, but his radicalisation had been initiated in the ‘real world’. Through a common friend, Munshi had met Aabid Khan at Dewsbury central mosque. Khan had attended a terrorist training camp in Pakistan and served as a recruiter for the Islamist militant movement in the Dewsbury area.27 He also had a history of online jihadist activity and was closely connected to the ‘superstar’ of jihadism online, Younis Tsouli (‘terrorist007’), as well as a number of foiled bomb plotters in Sarajevo, Washington DC, and Toronto. Khan spotted Munshi’s knowledge of computers, and carefully groomed him to become a leading part of his online network.
As with Khan, whose real world contacts informed his online activities, Munshi’s radicalisation too was a combination of face-to-face interaction and virtual consolidation. His online communication with a closed network of like-minded and older individuals consumed much of his time and represented the defining feature of his extremist existence. But it was the early meetings with Khan and some of his friends that helped turn a boy interested in religion into a young man dedicated to killing ‘non-believers’.
NOTHING happens exclusively on the Internet, including radicalisation. There may be some people who actually believe that to be the case, but for the most part the "Jihadis are radicalised on the Internet" meme is a straw man created by those who - for any of a number of reasons - wish to attack that opinion in order to promote their own view of events. The Munshi case represents how real and virtual spaces, relationships, associations, and opportunities combined to deepen Munshi's involvement with and commitment to the jihad. Posted on 05 April 2009 @ 16:21