[Magdalen] San Bernardino & IS.

[Sally Davies]

Regarding the marriage/engagement: there can be legal issues with Islamic
marriages because in the traditional marriage ceremony the woman is not
present - she's waiting at home, all dressed up, for the husband and family
elders to complete the business at the mosque. At least that is what
happens here, and could be why the US regarded them as engaged not married,
until a civil marriage took place with both partners present to sign the
register before the marriage officer.

Regarding "radicalisation" - it's a concept I find rather unhelpful and
over-used, a pseudo-explanation. Doesn't it look as though this guy Farook
was deliberately recruited by Daesh via the dating site? His profile marks
him out as a sitting duck, not least his interest in guns/"Target
practice", his evident loneliness, his integration with American society
which makes him a perfect sleeper, and the vagueness of his expectations
regarding the bride he dreams of.

And their expertise with using social media to recruit and manipulate is
now legendary.

With a house stuffed full of guns, ammo and half made pipe bombs it
certainly doesn't look like a shoot-em-up temper tantrum, though they might
not initially have planned to attack the Centre, it rather looks as though
they were planning for a cinema and maybe some further Paris style attacks.

One of the things that deeply worries me about the air bombing of Syria and
Iraq, is that there are so many Farooks. People who start out ordinary and
get caught up in the mind games and power abuses of Daesh and their true
collaborators. Not to mention the people, especially women and girls, who
are extensively trafficked by the organisation, and those who serve as
suicide bombers because it's the only way to protect their families. They
will all die if homes are bombed...without adequate ground forces and
intelligence it's hard to see how anything can be achieved other than,
perhaps, to put Assad back in control of Syria if that genie can be put
back in the bottle. In which case Daesh will move its centre elsewhere
probably North Africa.

I don't have an answer but as a psychologist I think it's unwise and
dangerous to resort to simplistic explanations of people's
behaviour....though I thought Jim O's comments on the psychological effect
of firing big guns are very interesting...

Emotional rejection, uncomfortable identities, violent fantasies,
availability of weaponry, the excitement of being part of a secret
army...there are so many things that have little to do with
"radicalisation" but which draw certain people to acts of terror and
sometimes to ideologies of terror as well, but the latter is not necessary
for every terrorist and there are plenty who believe in nothing much. It
helps if you want to recruit someone for a suicide mission or one with
faint hope of escape..in Paris they used drugs didn't they?

It's also notable that young recruits like the Paris killers often have
histories of being misfits and of lacking a moral compass/conduct disorder.
Daesh provides a version of that, whilst accommodating and directing the
violent rage and frustration they feel. Others are more like Farook, tired
of being a "nobody" and of feeling alone.

>From a counter terrorism POV it might mean that instead of obsessing about
new Syrian immigrants (who are already victims of Islamist terror and are
extensively vetted), the focus should be on the children of the previous
generation of immigrants, and how they are managing the difficult cultural
and emotional transitions common to those circumstances.

Sally D





On Saturday, December 5, 2015, Grace Cangialosi <gracecan at gmail.com> wrote:

> One report said that they met online.
>
> > On Dec 4, 2015, at 7:17 PM, Roger Stokes <roger.stokes65 at btinternet.com
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> >
> >> On 04/12/2015 18:12, Jay Weigel wrote:
> >> ​Going to Saudi Arabia is also not unusual for a Muslim, as making Hajj
> is
> >> one of the Five Pillars of Islam, and Mecca also happens to be in Saudi
> >> Arabia.​
> >>
> >> Did her family also live in Saudi Arabia, or was she working there?
> There
> >> are a lot of South Asians working in the Middle East. A fair number of
> the
> >> South Asian nurses I worked with had worked in various countries on the
> >> Arabian peninsula, some in Saudi Arabia.
> >
> > One thing that struck me as strange was that he was apparently settled
> in the USA (I don't know where his parents came from).  He then went to
> Saudi Arabia and married someone he may have met over there.  Was there
> familial pressure on both sides to get married?  I am used to the idea of
> Muslims from this country going back to the area their family came from to
> find a spouse.  I don't think this is a good idea but I am familiar with
> it.  How was the match arranged?
> >
> > Roger
>