Deradicalizing the Radicalized

"He definitely asks a lot of questions. He's not a dumb kid, and for someone to misguide him or mislead him -- he wouldn't say yes to anything. He would make sure he had all the answers before doing something drastic."
"He wanted to do something with his life, for sure. I still can't believe this is him.
"He definitely didn't know anything about God. There are tons of things I could sit down and say, but I don't know if he'll get out alive."
"It sounds like he's on a one-way street right now."
Luke Lavictoire, former friend of John Maguire/Abu Anwar al-Canadi, ISIS jihadist

"I assume at one point that man [John Maguire] was fed up, perhaps bored of our society and felt he didn't perhaps fit in with our society. That would be my hypothesis. And that led to a quest for personal significance."
"I think the evidence is very clear about mental health and terrorism: There's actually no link."
"We know that people that have mental illness are stigmatized in our society. And now to, on top of that, say that they may be radicals or future terrorists -- imagine the label we're putting onto those people."
Jocelyn Belanger, psychology professor, L'Universite du Quebec a Montreal, deradicalization expert

In a six-minute propaganda video, Muslim convert John Maguire apparently reads a scripted message and refers repeatedly to the October killings of two Canadian forces members.
THE CANADIAN PRESS

Nice, balanced people of moderate thought and pro-social behaviour are taken aback that anyone living in the same society as they would be so sociopathic as to turn their lives inside-out, embroiling themselves in a battle zone in a far-off geography representing dire hostility in tribal societies where religious antipathies against those of other sects are so poisonous that the will to slaughter becomes second nature.

When the normal among us, even the dysfunctional-normal with their own little sociopathic tendencies hear of a fellow national making the self-improvement decision to become a messenger of god and in so doing commit themselves to proselytize in a manner quite repulsive to Western thought and values, the response seems to be that the individual becoming that warrior for jihad must have had his brain scrambled into a form of lethal lunacy.

But testifying before the Senate national security committee on Monday, psychology professor Dr. Belanger threw the cold water of reason on that hot theory. The man who was known as John Maguire until the time he converted to Islam a few years back, in his opinion, most likely suffered an identity crisis, not episodic psychosis. That he has a personality disorder of extreme proportions is hardly debatable, since he finds the prospect of murder in the name of God agreeable to his prospects for achieving martyrdom.

For jihad, to be successful, is mated with the aspiration to serve Islam in the most propitious manner, with the supreme sacrifice of martyrdom. Achieved through sacrificing the unwilling victims of jihadist rage to an early and often horrible death. Which in effect means that the sacrifice is not that of the jihadist, but that of his targets for murder; the jihadist's reward is ascent to Paradise and the service of nubile virgins.

Those, clearly, are Abu Anwar al-Canadi's aspirations. About as far from the thoughts and aspirations of his former high school chums as Hawaii is from the Antarctic. On the other hand, posited Dr. Belanger, should John Maguire regain his senses, recant, and become a turncoat to jihad, repulsed by the violence and mayhem, no longer willing to take part in atrocities, he could become a valuable member of civil society once again.

How forgiving we tend to be: people, stated the estimable expert on deradicalization, who have disengaged themselves from fiercely radical causes could become "beacons of change" for others. "That triggers a doubt in their mind, to see someone who has been deradicalized. All of a sudden they see that person very differently, then that creates uncertainty about their beliefs and that perhaps stimulates the possibility of change."

Or, alternately, makes of the one who has disabused himself of his love affair with jihad, an extremely viable target for beheading, himself.