UNITE TO SAVE YOUTH
If there is an overarching theme that emerges in Herald reporter Dylan Robertson’s illuminating series, The Radical Reality, it’s one of alienation and isolation. Robertson is this year’s recipient of the Michelle Lang Fellowship — named for the Herald journalist who was killed in 2009 while reporting from Afghanistan. He spent a year examining in depth the homegrown radicalization of Muslim youth as his seminal project for the fellowship program.
The issue of youthful alienation isn’t new, with cults traditionally having had a gravitational pull on disaffected youth seeking a common cause and community. But while radical Islam possesses the essential components of a cult, all similarity ends there. In previous decades, cults operated in their bizarre, though usually non-criminal, realms. Today, thousands of youths, among them a number of Calgarians, are flocking overseas to join ISIL and embracing terrorism.
The foundational stories have a pattern: Classmates recall a good student and nice kid, but signs of disillusionment and isolation begin showing up in the late teens and early 20s. Along with this, an obsessive amount of time may be spent on the Internet, with its thousands of portals to radicalism. As this peeling away from the everyday world does its insidious work, the youth becomes imbued with the imagined greatness of the vision that radical Islamism offers him, a promise of purposefulness to his life away from what he newly perceives as a society in need of radical reform, an invitation to be part of something far grander than following a conventional route in life.
Too late, family, friends and fellow worshippers at his mosque wonder what happened and how they failed to recognize it in time. Too late, everyone tries to put the puzzle pieces together and flailing about in an orgy of self-blame, seeks to come up with some means of saving other youth from the same fate.
If youth radicalism is fuelled by a sense of the community’s dissolution, then the community must reunite in common cause against it. That perception of a fractured community runs like a common thread through the fabric of North American society — neighbours don’t know each other’s names, children don’t play outdoors, teens are more connected online.
Parents, imams and the police must re-create the community, join forces and come up with strategies to reach out to vulnerable youth before they get to that stage.
ISIL’s rampage of terror and barbarism has stunned and horrified the world. It’s equally horrifying that thousands of young people whose lives hold so much promise are throwing their futures away on the darkest of causes.