| HN Mirror

Why must it be either/or? One can critique (certain tenets of) Islamic thought, yet recognize that there's an interaction between the narrative an individual has about their life (i.e. I'm being disenfranchised) that interacts with their cultural/religious background, making them more prone to certain interpretations of their faith and more committed to these interpretations and their behavioral consequences. You can empathize with an individual that feels like an outcast while not necessarily making a positive moral judgment of their religion or their subjective interpretation of their own predicament. Without "appeasing them" (whatever that means). Nobody in the article you are replying to has made any argument about moral equivalence. To me, they seem to be mostly pragmatic and interested in preventing crime, and the article makes it seemingly effective.

Generally I experience that wanting the world to be a certain way does not necessarily make it so. The act of judging Islam, does not necessarily transform it, or its followers. To sway people, you have to understand how they are swayed. I do not discount that some might be swayed by criticism, threat or use of force (i.e. dealing with potential extremists), but these are not necessarily the actions that have the best outcome. I think the "Aarhus model" is interesting in so far as that the officers involved seem to be pragmatical: hey, if we do this, then, in our experience and according to this science, we might very well achieve this certain desired outcome. So let's debate if that is true - instead of getting into this tiresome debate about how people need to be more negative about islam, which in no way I can ascertain contributes to change.

I do not believe in the "debate model of change": that people change when they "lose" a debate, and therefore we must all be voracious in our judgment of those people. The model seems to say: if only the entire western world voiced, in harmonic unison, this grand thesis that Islam itself is the problem, by sheer force of this combined act of judgment, the Islamic world would think "dude, I really think these people are on to something. They are right" and cast off their shackles and their cultural heritage. In fact, I find the model frightening because it says: "unless you join me in disparaging another people's culture, you are part of the problem". Which makes it impossible to have a debate on how to engage with people, because somehow engaging with them is seen as appeasement or agreeing with them (I can empathize with someone I do not agree with). Which limits the options we have in pragmatically working on changing our world: by engaging those people that are problematic, trying to find out why they think a certain way, and intervene in a way that maximises effect.

"In order to be involved in, or be a guide to, the transforming of the present into the future state - the essence of our work - one must have the skill to do this in such a way that the object with which one is working is not violated, but is transformed according its own laws" - Kaplan

EDITED to add: If I interpret you correctly, your argument is that these youngsters are not radicalized, because islam itself is radical, so "radicalized muslim" is a pleonasm of sorts. This is a flawed argument because it can not explain why some Muslims commit to violent action while others do not (reminder, there are hundreds of millions of muslims). For any productive discussion on change to take place, one will have to try and find the x here: "follower of islam + x = commits to violence". I do not know what exactly the x is, but I call people where x exists radicalized.