According to today’s New York Times, the man nicknamed “Jihadi John (below), responsible for at least six on-camera beheadings, has been identified by British security services. As we’ve come to expect, this is no poverty-stricken Muslim taking revenge on the West for his deprivation. From the NYT:
The man in the black balaclava who seems to have beheaded several foreign hostages in Islamic State videos has been identified by British security services as Mohammed Emwazi, a British citizen from London.
Known in the news media as “Jihadi John,” he is said to have been born in Kuwait and traveled to Syria in 2012. His name was first published on Thursday on the website of The Washington Post.
It was confirmed by a senior British security official, who said that the British government had identified Mr. Emwazi some time ago but had not disclosed his name for operational reasons.
Mr. Emwazi, 27, grew up in West London and graduated from the University of Westminster with a degree in computer programming.
However, his “radicalization” may be partly the result of detention by British officials after an apparently innocuous trip. That, of course, doesn’t begin to excuse what Emwazi did.
Mr. Emwazi apparently became radicalized after being detained by the authorities after a flight with friends to Tanzania in 2009 for a safari after graduation. He was held and accused by British intelligence officers of trying to make his way to Somalia.
Friends of his told The Post that Mr. Emwazi and two others — a German convert to Islam named Omar and another man, Abu Talib — never made it to the safari. On landing in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in May 2009, they were detained by the police and held overnight before eventually being deported, they said.
Asim Qureshi, a research director at CAGE, a British advocacy organization opposed to what it calls the “war on terror,” met with Mr. Emwazi in the fall of 2009. “Mohammed was quite incensed by his treatment, that he had been very unfairly treated,” Mr. Qureshi told The Post.
. . . Shiraz Maher, a senior fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence, at King’s College London, said on Twitter that Mr. Emwazi, “middle class & educated, demonstrates again that radicalization is not necessarily driven by poverty or social deprivation.”
The Post piece suggest, however, that Emzawi might really have been trying to reach Somalia.
Read the Times article and especially the Post article from which it was taken to learn more about Emzawi’s wanderings to Kuwait and back, his few statements that we know about, and what his friends say about him. Several security agencies, and Emzawi’s family, refuse to comment, but his name has apparently been known to authorities for some time—probably because they wanted to target him in secrecy.
Emwazi is now a marked man, as several nations will be out to get him. My preference, of course, would be to capture him alive and make him spend the rest of his days in prison (that’s what I would have preferred for Osama bin Laden, too, and we actually could have done that). But if a capture attempt is too risky, or he dies in such an effort, I would shed no tears for his loss.
(Note: The Daily Mirror has an earlier report that Jihadi John was killed and replaced with a double.)
h/t: P.
I’m not surprised that this man was well educated because we’ve seen radicalization cross demographics AND like cultish behaviour seems to cross demographics as well. As long as people are susceptible to dogmatic, unyielding, close-minded beliefs (which religion is really good at), there will be radicalization.
More evidence against the dogma that ‘deprivation done it’. Not that many of the apologists will take this into account – the belief that Islamic extremism is entirely down to extrinsic political and societal factors is so embedded it has become essentially unfalsifiable. No evidence anyone provides will convince apologists that religion is the motivation. I wish more people would ask Aslan, Armstrong, etc. ‘how would you define a religiously-motivated attack?’. I suspect that if they were to give a definition it would be easy to find real-life examples that fit the bill.
It’s a straightforward question, it’s not hypocritical, it’s not Islamophobic, it’s a simple request for clarification. Every time someone denies the role of religion in these attacks it should be asked. I’ve seen Jerry ask it a few times on this website but I’d very much like to see Irshad Manji, Maajid Nawaz, Douglas Murray or Sam Harris bring it up in one of their TV or radio debates/interviews. Please could you define your terms? It’s a pretty reasonable request. I don’t see how it’s possible to answer it without implicitly admitting to either inconsistency or the possession of unfalsifiable beliefs.
It is the same shell game that they play when asked to define the “true” instantiation of a religion. Please, for once a clear answer would be wonderful.
I’ve been looking into what turns someone into a Jihadi for a while, especially those from Western backgrounds, and deprivation is simply not a factor imo.
In fact, it’s similar to what turns young people into fundamentalist Christians, the only difference being their aren’t a-holes like Anjem Choudary to take them to the next level.
It’s too much to go into here, but there are British organisations that research this whose info can be accessed online. A particularly good one is the Quilliam Foundation, which also has a YouTube channel with interesting stuff.
Quilliam seem to be doing good work and I’m a big fan of Nawaz. Unfortunately the constructive criticism they offer is immediately dismissed as agenda-driven by community nodding dogs like Mo Ansar. Whilst the left continue coddling Islam, and shouting down its critics, many Muslim voices will continue to ignore external criticism and stifle internal criticism.
The single most telling clip in this respect is the Nawaz vs Mehdi Hasan/Mo Ansar Newsnight debate re. Hasan retweeting a Jesus ‘n’ Mo cartoon(a single, very dull panel from a Jesus ‘n’ Mo cartoon). It says so much about both the tactics these guys use to neutralise criticism, and the incredible thin-skinned aggression that pops up whenever they feel cornered. Neither Hasan nor Ansar say anything about the absurdity of the reaction to Maajid Nawaz’s tweet: their attack(and they always go on the attack) is centred entirely on the fact that Nawaz knowingly ‘offended’ some Muslims. It’s this co-option of a particular politically-amenable vocabulary that enables them to escape the central intolerance of their position. You’d think by listening to people like Mo Ansar that they’d been hideously wronged and that Quilliam were some kind of far-right organisation run by the government with the express intention of chucking bricks through people’s windows. It’s a very convincing performance.
It’s the overwhelming apathetic apologism of the liberal left that allows many Muslim figures to simply dismiss all criticism as agenda-driven. After all, if liberals are on your side everyone else has a racist agenda right? That’s why it’s so crucial that there are liberals who speak out – every single liberal critic of Islam is evidence against the contention that only racists think Islam is a problem. Apologies for my broken record impersonation but there really do seem to be fewer and fewer voices of sanity around. I tried to think of a few, non gnu, non-Jewish(Jewish voices are regarded as inherently biased so they can be set to one side), liberal critics of Islam and I came up short.
Incidentally I was cheered up by recently watching Irshad Manji’s Head-To-Head with Mehdi Hasan. If ever I feel like this is all a hopeless cause I go and watch that interview. It’s a masterpiece of steely, single-minded progressivism(in the face of some truly aggravating questioning). She is truly majestic.
Yes, to everything you said. So many fellow liberals have the knee-jerk reaction that any criticism of any group that in the West is a minority must be based on bigotry, especially if the majority of the members of that group aren’t of European descent. To me it shows their own internalized prejudice because they’re so focused on things like country of ancestral origin, they assume others are too. Also, it seems to make them unable to analyze situations involving such groups in a balanced way.
I don’t know if they got any press in America but in Britain, ever since Emwazi was unmasked, a group called CAGE have been absolutely everywhere spreading the most jaw-dropping apologetics. If Jerry wanted an example of how topsy-turvy British media can be he could do worse than look at how a group that describes Emwazi as a “beautiful young man”, “extremely kind, extremely gentle”, etc. have managed to make it to the top of every single news programme in the land.
Well, there is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. 😉
Good,
I hope he catches Ebola and spreads it to all his stupid ISIS friends.
Wrong side of the continent, conspecific.
Off the top of my head, there hasn’t been a case of Ebola in Tanzania for a very long time (caveat : identified case), if ever. There have been cases “in the wild” in Uganda and in Sudan, but I don’t recall Tanzania or Somalia being on the appropriate list.
But what would I know about it? Oh yes – spending most of last year working in West Africa, having to work around losing access to staff because of an Ebola outbreak, and the year before working in various parts of Tanzania. I’m sure you’re better qualified.
By the way – what do you want him to infect his clever ISIS friends with? Or do you think that there are no clever people who choose to side with ISIS?
Don’t turn this into something it’s not.
I simply wish death upon all ISIS members.
Whether it’s Ebola or with bombs, I don’t care.
You’re being antagonistic for no reason, stop it.
I’m being antagonistic because you clearly have little idea of the people and areas to which you refer and are probably lumping them all together as “foreign” and therefore unimportant to know any detail about.
Relish your ignorance if you want to. But don’t flaunt it unless you like to be told you’re ignorant.
Looking around at the rednecks who make up the largest single group of the approximately 35 nationalities on board, I just have this suspicion that you’re an American.
I’m not American, Sir.
But thank you for lumping me in with a ‘foreign’ American stereotype.
Your righteous attitude is in equal parts sickening and laughable.
Stop talking like an angry young man, it’s the most tiresome type of generic personality trait!
I never claimed to know the intricate details of Ebola, the places where Ebola is most prevalent, or anything of the sort, did I? I admit, I know next to nothing about Ebola and its history. You best me in that regard, well done.
Here’s a task for you, matey. Go back to the first comment I made which you replied to…………..read it……….now, does that frivolous, throwaway comment I made deserve this kind of argumentation?
Go away.
(1) Yes.
(2) No.
You can carry on this conversation by yourself then.
See ya 😉
If Ebola, and treating it, is your life’s work, then I apologize for being so trite and silly about it, wasn’t my intention.
Nope, it is just another of those problems that appears and causes problems at work.
I’m only seeing one flaunter here, Aidan.
If the newspapers are fingering the wrong man, we can expect some very high-profile libel suits.
He’ll have to come forward, from wherever he has been, and will be put upon by the media to reflect on his comings and goings of the last few years.
Reblogged this on Manjeet Kumar.
Radicalization is certainly not limited to the underemployed and socially deprived. OBL would be a prime example. But I can accept that it would be a contributing risk factor.
You’re not going to get a similar level of nuance in any of your opponents’ arguments. There are these two block-headed dogmas fighting for supremacy, one which says nothing bad that happens is ever down to Islam, the other which says that everything bad that happens is down to Islam. You could define the split as essentially along left/right grounds, although the Islamic allies of the left are often far more conservative than the left’s conservative opponents, and of course both sides hate each other, but they seem to be united in one thing, which is their loathing of that tiny sliver of opinion which disagrees with both sides. Hatred of Dawkins and Harris and Maajid Nawaz, even Lawrence Krauss(who became a hate figure almost overnight, simply by openly opposing religion), is shared equally by liberals and conservatives. Both sides say you’re either with them or you’re against them. It’s like they’ve absolved themselves of any responsibility to consider someone’s position and arguments as a whole – it’s much easier to use a simple, insane rule of thumb.
I am unashamedly part of that tiny sliver of opinion but it feels like we’re slowly getting squeezed out of the discussion. Even my beloved Beeb seems to be nailing its colours to the mast in a rather unhelpful, one-note fashion.
Or it could be on *behalf* of those who are, particularly those who have been smashed or droned.
That’s why I’ve said one should work to make extremism less attractive by for one thing stopping one’s government messing around in other countries. (Again, this is a causal claim.)
Oh, I absolutely agree there. This is one reason why I think that Obama has been relatively laudable for not getting us fully embroiled in yet another Middle East conflict. As tempting as that is (and it is tempting), we will only f*** it up.
Does anyone else always read that name as Jilted John, then do a double-take?
Let’s hope no-one tries to arrest John Shuttleworth.
For reasons explicable only to people of a certain age and culture, I’m going to make some toast.
If I’ve got the right not-quite-one-hit-wonder.
For two years at school I lived in a private dorm where about two dozen students from Lebanon where also staying. Most were Muslim, a few were Christian.
I got to know many of them, and became pretty good friends with a few. One thing that really struck me at that time, as I was living with these people, was a very pervasive sense of fatalism that they all shared, both Christian and Muslim, that was a marked contrast to the typical US native certainly, but also compared to any of the other people / cultures I’d had experience with.
You could see it in everything from their attitudes with respect to their studies to every social interaction. It was both poignant and often frustrating.
This pervasive fatalism seems to me to render such people rather fragile with respect to becoming radicalized. Most of these people that I got to know were in most (maybe all?) respects as decent as the typical westerner, even from a western point of view. But there was always a sense that things could go rapidly down hill given certain triggers.
I’ve seen that too. But I’ve seen it in other members of the younger generation – in people who’ve been bullied, marginalized, people suffering from depression, isolation or loneliness, that sort of thing. The internet just doesn’t provide adequate social connection and support. Quite a good number of them more emotionally fragile, and lack the needed supportive face time with people.
Strange – I don’t recall seeing any of those purposes in the RFCs which defined the Internet when it was being set up. Who extended the job specification that way?
I am in full agreement that the best outcome would be for him to be tried and convicted in a trial where he is afforded every bit of due process. Let him stand trial like the common gangster he is.
The irony of the whole thing is just mind-boggling:
He may or may have not have been treated unfairly during his initial detention which might have contributed to his radicalization. But by becoming the person who he is now he now richly deserves whatever is coming to him.
Here I am the devils advocate. I couldn’t help but notice the juxtaposition of the post on crime and punishment for the shooter of the sniper, and the last paragraph of this post. Mr. Emmwazi has killed multiple people horribly. I agree society should be protected from him for life. Should we attempt to treat him for the cause of his crime and potentially release him? Imprisoning him would not be a deterrent, in fact it would inspire others to follow in his footsteps ala Guantanamo. Why would you not shed a tear for his death if he could not stop himself? It’s seems at some level you would shed a tear for the sniper shooter. Why the judgmental tone regarding the former? This is where my doubt creeps in. I am really trying to understand.
Just for starters, we know the guy that killed the sniper was mentally ill. However, this serial killer over in Syria — probably not.
I agree with you. I am just trying to understand dr. Coyne’s position on this man in the context of the previous post re the reasons for imprisonment, and personal responsibility.
Unless of course you view religion as a mental illness.
“Mr. Emmwazi has killed multiple people horribly . . . Should we attempt to treat him for the cause of his crime and potentially release him? Imprisoning him would not be a deterrent, in fact it would inspire others to follow in his footsteps ala Guantanamo.”
Just congenially curious – is that also your perspective on his multitude of Daesh cohorts/peers?
I clearly said I was playing devils advocate. Of course I do not condone any of this violence or horrible acts. See my reply above.
Yes but it clearly wasn’t simply devil’s advocate either was it? “why the judgemental tone regarding the former? This is where my doubt creeps in.”
I think it’s a pretty natural set of human reactions to on the one hand someone who, apparently due to mental illness, murdered a guy at a firing range, and on the other hand to someone who beheaded a long line of aid workers, journalists and others whilst bragging about it on camera. I have a similar gut reaction to the two killers but like Jerry I would separate that reaction from questions about what kind of punishment they should receive. You might feel outraged, you might not, but that visceral, instinctive reaction shouldn’t play a part in guiding your thinking on sentencing. I think Jerry separated the two pretty clearly in his post.
What about a frontal lobotomy? Oh my! his lobes are missing!
I think you are confusing an expression of emotion with reasoned thoughts about what the goal of a criminal justice system should be and how to build it, in order to help achieve the best society we can.
Jerry said right there in the piece that he would rather Jihadi John be captured and imprisoned rather than killed. That is his reasoned response. That’s the kind of society he wants to live in. He doesn’t want to live in a society where the criminal justice system’s goal is to satisfy people’s emotionally driven desires for revenge or retribution, despite what emotions a specific criminal / crime may engender in him.
The guy who does the ‘Forbidden Fruit’ atheist videos on YouTube contends religious belief is a mental illness.
Perhaps if Mr Emmwazi was treated from that point of view i.e. his delusional state that he believes he’s doing this for an imaginary supernatural being, progress could be made. I don’t know much about mental illness, so I don’t know if that is possible.
I think there are likely to always be people that can’t be “cured” no matter how advanced we become. If there isn’t anything wrong with them there isn’t anything to fix.
In any case, if you can’t fix them another alternative to killing them is to put them away for life in reasonably healthy conditions.
How we deal with criminals is just one part of the equation, albeit a major part, but I think it likely that as we improve towards a better society that is more like Star Trek TNG than what we have now, the incidence of criminals like Mr. Emmwazi will trend lower. That’s the idea and given the large collation of statistics, and the analysis of the data, published by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels Of Our Nature there is reason to for some optimism.
Maybe of interest to some readers of this blog:
Hardin, Russell. 2002. “The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism,” In Albert Breton, Gianluigi Galeotti, Pierre Salmon, and Ronald Wintrobe, eds., Political Extremism and Rationality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 3-22
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/politics/faculty/hardin/research/Crippled.pdf
also reprinted in:
Russell Hardin: How Do You Know? The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge. Princeton University Press, 2009
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8928.html
Hardin is professor of politics at New York University. Used to be at University of Chicago.
Thanks. 🙂
Sleeping with one eye open is difficult.
Ask a dolphin and they’ll tell you that sleeping with no eyes open is even harder.
Excellent point. I taught electronics in the service and, thanks to you, now realize that many of my students were dolphins. 🙂
Raping Yazidi girls can be remotely understood as having some attraction, some sexual gratification is involved, methinks.
Cutting off heads, however, is plainly psycho.
The question is: is this guy a psycho who used Islam, or did Islam make him a psycho?
Some institutions attract weirdoes. ISIS candidates tend to be slightly autistic and OCD. These guys get picked on and get very angry inside and dream and plot of getting even with anything they mentally can demonize as the cause of their suffering. It is common in groups to blame your problems on someone or something that is not among the group. In the near east the west is primarily the main scapegoat for all their conspiracy theories. Very convenient but inaccurate factually speaking. But facts don’t matter in the workings of faith based logic. Every Christian and Westerner is a Crusader and every Jew is a Jew. These guys grow ISolated within their oppressive cultures they are trained from birth to hate the west and that honor has to do with dying and murdering for you god and tribe. ISIS supports these irrational behaviors and glorifies them and so attracts the mentally confused and disenfranchised 1% which is mainly Islamic youth in their teens and 20s as a thing to be a part of when they have otherwise failed socially and economically. The West, Christians, Jews, and disagreeing Muslims, and other assorted Kafirs become their emotional punching bags. These Islamic youths catch what I call ISISITIS. It is a serious disease that can spread. If they survive ISISITIS, and live past 35, they might then outgrow their angst and may have less of an emotional need to murder and rape (which their version of Islam encourages). In the West we should try to see if we can come up with alternative activities and institutions that might keep these angry youths off the street so to speak, and unavailable to ISIS.
Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about exerting power, control and dominance. Often its carried out by those who feel they don’t have any.
If you are having fantasies about what you think is rape related to someone you are attracted to, think about how you want it to end – assuming you’re basically normal, you don’t want him/her to feel scared, violated, and all the other things that come from being raped.
“Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about exerting power, control and dominance.”
I think it’s about all those things, Heather.
I should have been clearer. Where my “doubt creeps in” and what I am trying to understand is the contrast between
“In fact, everyone is “insane” in some way when they commit a crime, for something about their genes and environment has led them to a situation where they do a bad thing, and they cannot help themselves, regardless if they know (or internalize) right from wrong. The “knowing right from wrong” criterion is irrelevant for conviction because it didn’t suffice to stop the person from committing a crime based on deterministic factors. Where it may be relevant is how to punish a criminal; but it’s not clear that the “knowing” criterion should be the one factor mandating jail versus psychiatric treatment, or how that treatment is given.”
And
“Emmwazi is now a marked man, as several nations will be out to get him. My preference, of course, would be to capture him alive and make him spend the rest of his days in prison (that’s what I would have preferred for Osama bin Laden, too, and we actually could have done that). But if a capture attempt is too risky, or he dies in such an effort, I would shed no tears for his loss.”
I think this guy should be captured alive, locked up and the key thrown away. His actions are horrific and I am appalled. I think it is perfectly natural to not shed a tear for him if he gets killed and I certainly wouldn’t. The reasoning that I doubt, or where my doubt creeps in, is with regard to the free will issue and in NOT being judgmental, and NOT wanting to just lock him up forever.
Was he “insane”? Does he deserve “treatment”? As dr. Coyne’s suggests? Why would we not shed a tear for this guy if he got shot, yet say a impoverished undereducated guy from the inner city who killed someone and got shot during capture would be in some sense be seen more as a tragedy– would deserve treatment(if such existed). I know why they are different and why I am more outraged at one vs the other. But per Dr. Coynes first paragraph above, neither were responsible and were a product of their genes and environment– why should his emotional response be different if that is true?
I heard Arie Kruglanski, a researcher on terrorism, talk about this and the take away point seemed to be social deprivation has next to nothing to do with radicalization. If that were the case, members of mistreated minorities in Muslim countries (and there are a LOT of them) would overwhelmingly comprise the ranks of the world’s terrorists. In fact terrorists tend to come from mainstream religious sects and of middle class background. They tend to see moral issues in black and white. And they find a utopia in a stifling social order which tamps down curiosity, uncertainty and the mental hurdle of fleshing out nuances. Heck, if one hadn’t known the subject under discussion was terrorists you’d be forgiven for thinking Kruglanski was discussing Republicans.
My preference, of course, would be to capture him alive and make him spend the rest of his days in prison
Now that we’ve all seen him in earlier days with a Pittsburgh Pirates ballcap, there is another option in that unlikely event – send him to Pittsburgh and we’ll take care of him.
Hmmm, I smell the smell of rotten rodents, in abundance. There are un-told stories behind that statement, which are pretty glaringly obvious to anyone with a little knowledge of the area.
Firstly, if you’re going to Tanzania as a stepping stone to Somalia, then you’ve either got some seriously misplaced geography, or you’ve got additional information sources guiding your movements. Tanzania and Somalia don’t have a common border. So I’d infer that someone guided them to go to Tanzania as attracting less attention (precisely because of the lack of a border), and to then either illegally cross the border into Uganda, or “on the spur of the moment” join a cross-border safari. Credible, but takes considerably more knowledge than the quoted article implies – which itself implies a recruit guidance infrastructure which guided them.
Getting detained and deported on arrival in Tanzania … having been through (very likely) exactly the same immigration room on more than a few occasions, then they must have either been behaving spectacularly weirdly (screaming drunk Germans demanding that the TZ authorities accept Euros as a bribe for getting a non-existent 3-month business visa, instead of just buying a 1-month tourist visa and then changing it while in-country), or they’d been fingered by the authorities long before they arrived there.
Smelling the smell of extremely dead rodents in a story about the “security forces” – not exactly surprising.
I enjoyed Tz – great country, lovely people. But don’t ever take them for fools because they’ll hand you your dropped wallet, still full and then go and spend all your money.
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