RAQQA, Syria – When reading or thinking about ISIS –- what motivates its foot soldiers, the extremity of its ideology and all the varied ugliness and violence of its methods –- one of the last things on anybody’s mind is in what ways ISIS members may be like the rest of us.
It’s not a comfortable question, nor is it one too many people would deem relevant, I imagine. For those who oppose ISIS (which means, essentially, everyone who isn’t in the group, including other militant Islamists), the goal is to dismantle, demolish and defeat ISIS, not psychoanalyze its rank and file.
Be that as it may, a recent Daily Beast piece about the contents of a laptop seized from a Belgian woman who was part of ISIS until her recent capture reveals she was not so different from her peers back home, except for her allegiance to the brutal militant group.
The woman, described as a “Flemish-speaking Belgian woman who is of Moroccan descent,” used the laptop in ways you might expect a committed Islamist militant to deploy communications technology: visiting a Flemish-language Wikipedia page about the war in Afghanistan, watching videos of American warplanes attacking Taliban positions and watching sermons and lectures delivered by jihadist clerics, for example.
On the other hand, she also used her laptop to check on the scores of the latest matches involving Dutch soccer team Ajax, looking up recipes, playing Stickman Sniper, messing about with the “I Am T-Pain” app, watching Pirates of the Caribbean online and downloading porn –- a lot of porn.
According to the Daily Beast, the laptop’s hard drive contained “more than a terabyte of pornography,” including scenes with titles and descriptions like “enjoy first time sex” and “make him your teacher” along with repeated visits to Redtube.
Whatever you might think the data on the laptop represents, what it suggests to me is interest in music, food, sex and entertainment are about as universal as human interests get. The only thing more universal than these interests, it seems, is hypocrisy.
Whether we’re talking about jihadists watching porn, megachurch leaders who are publicly anti-gay but privately partying with rent boys, publicly pro-life politicians who encourage their secret lovers to get abortions, or men on the left end of the political spectrum who find some means of ignoring the vicious mistreatment of women when it comes from one of their cherished icons (like Chuck Berry), flagrant hypocrisy may be the only truly non-partisan human trait.
OK, so knowing members of ISIS as just as hypocritical as the rest of humanity isn’t exactly a reason to celebrate, but might it give us ideas for ways to dissuade people from signing up for extremists causes before they find their way onto a hardscrabble battlefield on the other side of the planet?
It’s a lot to read into the contents of a single laptop, I’ll admit. But what the evidence of interest in soccer, rap, recipes and Redtube on a jihadi’s hard drive says to me is for all their professed militant zeal and religious fervor, even some of the world’s most dogmatic extremists are drawn to cultural phenomena and forms of entertainment enjoyed by the very societies and systems they have rejected and fight against.
As a practical matter, it’s simply not possible to kill or jail every supporter of a group like ISIS, regardless how much those approaches may appeal to us. Along the way to the final demise of ISIS as a militant group, there will be some regretful ex-members who will need to be reintegrated into society. Who knows? The woman described in the Daily Beast article may even be one of them.
Admittedly, I’m no expert on “deprogramming” members of cults, militant groups and other forms of extremist organizations. If it would help, though, I’m fully willing to play video games with Belgian women or watch soccer and/or porn with them or even help them prepare delicious meals –- provided I’m the only one permitted to handle any sharp-edged kitchen utensils used in the process, of course.
