ARTICLE BY JOANNE PAYTON
Joanne Payton is a criminologist with expertise in harmful traditional practices, feminism, extremism and the Middle East.
How influential is ideology in extremism?
The Southport attacks left the community reeling from shock and grief, mourning the three girls murdered while they attended a Taylor Swift themed dance class. Information on Axel Rudakubana – the young man who stands accused of the Southport attacks – is hard to come by. References to him as a child – as a Dr Who fan, for instance – were quickly scrubbed from websites who did not want to be associated with the perpetrator of an horrendous attack upon very young girls.
Misinformation poured into this void. On X, for instance, Bernadette Spofforth stated that “Ali Al-Shakati was the suspect, he was an asylum seeker who came to the UK by boat last year and was on an MI6 watch list.”
This was a key piece of misinformation, which led to the outbreak of rioting – outraged individuals protesting the horrific crimes mingled with known racist thugs fuelled by a volatile mix of misinformation, anger, and fear, elements that can themselves be fertile ground for extremist ideologies. The impact was to further traumatise Southport residents, adding the burden of cleaning up their streets to their grief, and confining confused children to their homes.
The information that was initially released on the suspect was sparing, due to his age: he had been born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents; he had been raised as a Christian; he had been diagnosed with autism. This was augmented with further, far less banal information, released by the courts later – that Rudakubana was in possession of the deadly toxin ricin and the al-Qaeda training manual entitled ‘Military studies in the Jihad against the Tyrants’ were delayed.
The UK police, already strained after the killing of Chris Kaba, were concerned about their ability to handle any further rioting. Those who had taken part in the initial riots took this as vindication: Rudakbana could be reshaped in the form of an Islamist terrorist, in the mould of Hashim and Saleen Abedi, the brothers who bombed the Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena, killing 23, and injuring over a thousand attendees.
The shared association with female musicians – and particularly those popular with young girls – were similar, suggesting an Islamist loathing for women’s freedom, pleasure and self-expression. At a time when the Taliban were enwrapping women in silence, and when Iran was brutalising young women for ‘bad hijab’ the narrative was compelling. It is very unlikely his choice of attack – young girls dancing to the music of Taylor Swift – was not motivated by misogyny, as so many other spree killings have been.
Yet his choice of a terrorist manual cannot be taken as indicative of a coherent Islamist worldview, despite recent claims on social media.Terrorists might espouse purist, absolutist politics, but their methods are often far less pure: they freely copy and adapt methods from their rivals. Terrorists often use the materials of other organisations and movements; the Anarchist Cookbook was used by the 7/7 bombers, for instance, despite their vision of a Caliphate being regulated by strict sharia law.
Where methods are pick-and-mix, ideologies may also be arbitrary or capricious. The UK’s Prevent counter-terrorism organisation has noted an increase in forms of terrorism motivated by ‘Mixed, unclear and unstable’ motivations – these are an outcome of self-radicalisation, an ideological bricolage. While terrorist organisations often strictly control their member’s exposure to ideas, those who radicalise themselves via their wifi connections take on a ‘salad bar’ approach, drawing upon wide and often contradictory ideas to form their worldview. This may not even be intentional – as Gartenstein-Ross et al write:
The deluge of information in today’s online environment, and particularly in the social media space, may mean that people are shaped by the information rather than intentionally selecting certain ideas.
The internet has streamlined this process. Of the individuals profiled in PIRUS, a detailed US-based database on radicalisation, social media played a role in the process for 27% of them between 2005 and 2010 – but 73% between 2011 and 2016. And over the past decade in the U.S., a notable number of young people under 30 were radicalised without any formal group affiliations at all.
Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens and Moustafa Ayad propose two categories for these people motivated by these mixed, unstable and unclear ideologies.
Firstly, they highlight the overlap between racially/ethnically motivated violent extremism and Islamist extremism. Far-right groups and Salafi-jihadists are imitating each other’s language, aesthetics and tactics. On platforms like Telegram and Discord, white nationalists adopt jihadist rhetoric, and even identify as ‘National-Socialist Salafis.’ Meanwhile, Muslim extremists share 4chan influenced memes, including those featuring Spongebob Squarepants, Drake and characters from the Marvel franchise.
Secondly, Meleagrou-Hitchens and Ayad describe ‘conspiracy extremism,’ which lacks specific ideological roots, but often develops into anti-government and anti-liberal sentiment, which has led to violence and criminal acts linked to distrust in media, science and political institutions, such as protests related to vaccines and lockdown measures.
The would-be assassin of Donald Trump, Ryan Wesley Routh, despite registering as a Democrat over two decades earlier, had become drawn towards – and then disillusioned by – the populist razzamatazz of the Trump campaign. Rather than having a particular orientation to the political Left or Right, Routh’s motivation for the attempted murder was opaque: besides support for Ukraine and opposition to Iran, his reasoning for the planned assassination was unclear. He was not a member of any group nor invested in any specific ideology or value system. Instead he held a ‘rambling and fanciful worldview’ according to CNN, which he outlined in a self-published, eccentric, disjointed book.
Anders Breivik and his panoply of imitators show the impact of dark role models in radicalisation at an individual level – and the ability for lone actors to self-radicalise to extreme violence.Self-radicalised lone actors are presenting an increasing threat over the kind of organised terrorist activity, perpetrated for political aims, that has predominated discourse around terrorism since 9/11. After 9/11, a stunned America – which had considered itself invulnerable – cast around for explanations: many quickly settled upon Islam itself as the source of extremist terrorism.
Osama Bin Laden issued statements which framed this attack clearly within his own political project for the restoration of the Caliphate, and the destruction of American democracy. Such an explicitly political framing presented idealism – the fabled Caliphate, a Utopian future (if rather less inviting for women and non-Muslims) was contrasted with the grubby realities of Middle-Eastern geopolitics. Yet Bin Laden’s framing of terrorism as explicitly political has never been the full story. There are always psychological and sociological factors at play.
The speculation of ‘mixed and unstable’ worldviews may have played a role in Rudakubana’s case is not intended to be reassuring, or to distract from the threat of Islamist terrorism: the erratic nature of these crimes makes them harder to predict and prevent. There are no secret chat groups to penetrate, no meetings to infiltrate – no clear indication, before the fact, who is a fantasist and who has the capacity to perpetrate an atrocity like Southport.
It is perhaps due to this unpredictability that many people prefer to fit this crime into a familiar pattern, well-trodden through media and popular culture – a position which is particularly tempting to those already suspicious of Islam and of migrants. If Rudakubana were an avowed Islamist, then his actions would make a certain sort of sense, following a narrative of induction into an evil ideology, or of an inferior culture. Yet there is a strong chance that there is in fact no way to understand for us why he did what he did; that his actions only made sense within his own mind. This challenges the traditional narrative of terrorism, where ideology is seen as the driving force behind actions. In the chaotic, polarised and anomic social environment of the contemporary age, there may be no clear political or religious statements behind a terrorist act; it may just be a manifestation of instability, both psychological, social and ideological.