Masculinity drives violent extremism
Nihilistic rage can be turned into purpose with the right combination of support and guidance, Dina Temple-Raston writes.
Isat down with a young Minnesota teenager last year who had sold what little he owned – his sneakers, his iPhone and prized pieces of clothing – to buy an airplane ticket to Turkey. He wasn’t going for tourism. He’d decided to slip into Syria to join the Islamic State.
The reason he was drawn to the group had almost nothing to do with its ideology.
For him, going to Syria to fight was about something much more fundamental: It was about being a man; acting like a man.
That search for meaning ended up getting him arrested and charged with terrorism offences. The FBI intercepted him just before he stepped on a flight that would have taken him to Syria.
Michael Kimmel’s new book, Healing From Hate: How Young Men Get Into – and Out of – Violent Extremism,
Kimmel does a good job laying out the events that lead men to violence, and the trajectory seems standard. They are people who have endured humbling setbacks: lost jobs, difficulty in school, family issues.
He makes the case that rather than look inside themselves for the source of this misfortune, these men find fault with the system or immigrants or unseen outside forces conspiring to keep them down.
It is in the sections that focus on solutions that Kimmel is most successful. Among other things, he describes the ingenious ways some grass-roots groups have found to inject themselves into the conversation.
Kimmel writes that after meeting all these young men and spending time with them, he is ‘‘guardedly optimistic’’.
He sees a way to turn nihilistic rage into purpose with the right combination of support and guidance. – Washington Post