Satire and ridicule can help win the fight against al-Qaeda by stripping it of its glamor and mystique, a team of British researchers argued in a report released in London.
Beating the Islamist movement is as much about winning the battle of ideas and undermining al-Qaeda’s counter-culture cachet as it is about conventional anti-terrorism operations, the report said.
“Terrorism must be defeated through the deliberate ‘toxification’ of the al-Qaeda brand; not by making it seem dangerous, but by exposing it as dumb,” said Jamie Bartlett, one of the report’s authors.
“Al-Qaeda has to be ridiculed as the equivalent of a middle-aged dad at a school disco: enthusiastic, incompetent and excruciatingly uncool,” he said.
Bartlett, together with Jonathan Birdwell and Michael King, published The edge of violence, a radical approach of extremism on the Web site of the London-based think tank Demos on Friday.
The report summarized two years of work in Britain, Canada, Denmark, France and the Netherlands, which included interviews with 58 people convicted of terror-related offences and with 20 radical, but non-violent Muslims.
Researchers also interviewed 70 Muslims in Canada and 75 local and national experts.
“An increasingly important part of al-Qaeda’s appeal in the West is its dangerous, romantic and counter-cultural characteristics,” an executive summary of the report said.
“Young Muslims are drawn, like young people throughout the ages, to excitement, rebellion and a desire to be cool,” said Bartlett, who heads up the extremism and violence department at Demos.
“But like every anti-establishment movement before it, al-Qaeda has become cool, with Mr bin Laden cast as the new Che [Guevara],” he said.
One could not deny that ideology was important to some of al-Qaeda terrorists, he said.
“But there is a blind spot that people don’t quite see: There is another side for some people which is the call, the idea of adventure,” Bartlett said.
“You can understand: It’s quite exciting if you are from a rundown banlieue [suburbs] in Lyon or wherever, to go overseas, travel, see the world, get to shoot a gun. It’s not surprising that some young men would be drawn to that,” he said.
“This is true of young men the world over: whether it’s in Islam, in football hooliganism or in gangs,” he said.
So while it was important for the police and intelligence agencies to continue their battle against al-Qaeda, other tactics also had an important role to play.
Part of the battle was to strip the movement of its glamour and mystique, said the report.
Messages “from a range of organizations, should stress that most al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists are in fact incompetent, narcissistic, irreligious.”
The idea was to demystify terrorist lives and deaths, he said.
“The average day in the life of an Islamic extremist is similar to that of a petty criminal: tedious, lonely and punctuated by fear,” he said.
Satire was another powerful tool, the report added, noting that it had been used effectively against both the Ku Klux Klan and the British Fascist party in the 1930s.
Satire, however, was not a job for the authorities, but for others in society, it said.
Fighting al-Qaeda was not about preventing angry young Muslims from rebelling, but about finding ways to channel a natural sense of subversion and radicalism into non-violent areas, the report argued.
It also recommended a liberal approach to fighting al-Qaeda’s ideology, exposing it to debate rather than suppressing it, but being sure to provide effective counterarguments.
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