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Comment by digdigdag | Hacker News Reader

In my humble opinion, this is a bad idea. ISIS is an ephemeral problem in the world. One does not simply become a mujahideen convert from a YouTube session. More often than not, a lot of these guys and girls have lingering emotional baggage due to family life, education, their personal measure of success in life (or lack thereof), etc. What would impress me is if Google attacked the source of the problem once a for all. For ISIS to be eradicated, there has to be a fundamental paradigm shift in the way these people see the world. That means providing funds for schooling, education, access to internet and more importantly, free access to information.

Attempting to shape information into one that fits a certain narrative is what gave birth to ISIS. Why makes Jigsaw think this would work?

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>ISIS is an ephemeral problem

Why do you say that? Islamic extremism has been around for decades. ISIS is just one permutation.

>One does not become a mujahedin convert from one YouTube session

It is well documented that US citizens have binge watched extremist propaganda on YouTube and then murdered people. Ever hear of the Boston Marathon bombers? Heavily influenced by YouTube. Another example is Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez. There are many more.

>Google should...providing funds for schooling, education

Do you realize that many of these guys are highly educated and even obtain in advanced degrees at respected institutions?

>Attempting to shape information into one that fits a certain narrative is what gave birth to ISIS

No - I think what you are suggesting is that bad foreign policy or the middle eastern wars created ISIS. Just because bad communication and policy happened before doesn't not mean that good communication should not happen going forward.

People are dying in significant part due to ideologies. Google's approach sounds like it's well worth a shot.

> Islamic extremism...

Wrong emphasis I think. Extremism of any form seems to be part of the human condition. Religious zealotry is just one form and is not restricted to any one specific religion.

Yea like those Buddhist suicide bombers...

"Myanmar’s Buddhist Bigots"

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/20/opinion/malik-myanmars-bud...

"Meet the Violent Buddhists Starting Riots in Sri Lanka"

https://news.vice.com/article/meet-the-violent-buddhists-sta...

Rather than reply to each commenter saying violent extremism is unrelated to religion, I will simply leave this list of islamic terror attacks in the past 30 days.

https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/attacks/attacks.aspx?Yr=L...

Sure they can be. Also cults ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack ) and atheists (Countless far leftist militant suicide bombings or attacks).

Or those Christian extremists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan

"Religious zealotry is just one form" I don't think the comment you are replying to was saying all extremists are religious or all religions have extremists.

Peoples extremism can be totally unrelated to their religious beliefs. I'm sure there were agnostics fighting for and against the IRA, they were extremists that were agnostic. Even tho agnostics are the least likely to ever go to war over their religious beliefs it doesn't mean that they can find other reasons.

> Islamic extremism has been around for decades.

Over a millennium, actually.

> funds for schooling, education, access to internet and more importantly, free access to information

The ISIS recruits from western democracies had all of these things. In some cases they're recruited digitally. I'm glad someone is willing to fight the rhetorical battle with something other than bombast and saber rattling.

At least here, in Europe, the people who got recruited had already all of it. If western social system is not enough for the youth not to get recruited, I don't know what is.

That's the problem with current crisis. Politicians really don't know how to tackle this problem, because no one from our culture room really understands the problem and locals are sick and tired of hearing we need to be nicer, give more money, more time. They already have the possibilities one can ever touch in their hine countries.

>> Politicians really don't know how to tackle this problem, because no one from our culture room really understands the problem....

- ah but that is not entirely true! politicians do know what to do, but it is a tricky path. 》 move away from the Saudis & their cohorts in gulf arab countries. ISIS, AQ, AL Shahab etc are all ideological offshoots of Salafist/Wahhabist nexus. Counter this at the root (financially/ideologically/politically) and almost certain that 90% of the so called islamist extremism would flicker out.

this is going to be a multi year / multi pronged approach, and would need co-ordinated efforts by all kinds of actors (i.e. western + muslim governments, NGOs, religious groups etc). also a stellar idea would be to start giving more support to pluralistic streams of Islam i.e. Sufi, Ismaili, (some of the) Hanafi & like-minded faiths.

That's a very narrow minded historic view of "extremism" in Islam.

It is not centered around Salafism/Wahhabism even if it seems like so today. If you look at Afghanistan then before AQ/Taliban and Salafism moved in the "extremism/terrorism" started with Shia groups like the Hazara attacking the socialists in Afghanistan, when the soviets stepped in and cleared them out it left power vacuum that drew in the Salafists and the flavor of Islam changed (Afghanistan was far from religious, it was tribal and illiterate people couldn't read the quran and mosques outside of the major cities were rare than wells).

Israel's operations against Sunni groups in Lebanon and their alliance with the Christian Lebanese government and later on with the SLA left a power vacuum for groups like AMAL and later Hezbollah form which were Shia.

The "ratio" of Shia to Sunni groups can be attributed to the power struggle between Sunni and Shia Islam and between Saudi Arabia and Iran but 90% of the extremist organizations in the world won't die out if you focus on Wahhabism alone, you would only bolster their "opposition". There are nearly 100 Shia militias in Syria and Iraq today, they are fighting ISIS but they aren't "the good guys", neither are the Huties or Hezbollah.

Separating yourself from other people isn't exactly a path to good friendly stable longterm relationships.

Currently the West is building relationships and trying to influence these countries. You can see it succeeding with Saudi Arabia, in that Women are allowed to work there now. That's still a long way off from where we would like them to be but it shows that the strategy is working, it just takes time.

You just can't change people's values that quickly, it takes generations for that to happen.

If you want to accelerate that to a timeline that is measured in years, you're going to have to start what amounts to WWIII and occupy the middle east or make sure there's nothing left to occupy afterwards.

Sources? My understanding is that most of the perpetrators of recent attacks were already known to police (As thugs and petty criminals.)

He's talking about the guys who go to Syria to fight for ISIS, they are primarily 2nd and 3rd generation "immigrants" and fresh converts. You have everything from football stars to college students dropping everything to go fight for ISIS.

The mechanism is analogous to the problem with cults and violent radicals in the 19[67]0s. There is working psychology for treating it, but it doesn't work 100%. It was called "deprogramming" back then. We had in school warnings about cults as a preventative measure.

And I bet you a lot of them also at some point felt unhappy or felt a sense of misalignment with the ideals of their host nation, despite benefiting from the spoils of a western democracy. Some of them are brought up with the belief they're living in someone elses' world -- an unwelcomed guest that people have to 'handle' or or deal with.

This is the proper (and highly unpopular) course of action. There has to be a fix for this with a process to make the assimilation process that's palatable for both sides of the culture.

>There has to be a fix for this with a process to make the assimilation process that's palatable for both sides of the culture.

I'm not sure what "2 sides of the culture" are there, but if a person immigrates to France they should assimilate to the French culture, this is what assimilation means. There aren't really really 2 sides here, there is only one, and yes take it or leave while might sound harsh is pretty much the way to go because at some point you hit the tolerance paradox.

>And I bet you a lot of them also at some point felt unhappy or felt a sense of misalignment with the ideals of their host nation.

Well that's clearly a problem that should be addressed through education, not through "compromise".

>Some of them are brought up with the belief they're living in someone elses' world -- an unwelcomed guest that people have to 'handle' or or deal with.

Then again you fix that problem through education and cultural assimilation, if some one is being brought up and thought things which are antithetical to the worldview of the culture they live within it it's a problem. Moral relativism doesn't work in the real world, we had no problems telling South Africa that Apartheid was bad, no one was making an argument that it was their culture. If certain institutions are breeding ideals that are contrary to western ideals and values you deal with them on a case by case basis.

ISIS is anything but an ephemeral problem.

If you'll read "A Peace to End All Peace" it should become obvious that it was a near-inevitability. Most or many of the nations of the former Ottoman Empire were made up out of whole cloth by colonial powers in the region. These were often fronted by a "he might be a bastard but he's our bastard" strongman.

Now that those regimes have been either bombed out of existence, by invasion or have collapsed under their own weight ( or both ), there's a power vacuum.

There is a documentary I can't quite place now about the case of Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki. It involves someone who who lives in ... Canada? who does deprogramming of foreign-born Jihadis. This is analogous to deprogramming cult members.

IMO, this is a worthy effort.

In their defence: that's the whole point of AdWords, so it's not like this isn't already being done. It really is a creepy idea though not to mention antithetical to Western ideals. Furthermore the suggestion in the article that the "potential recruits" be arrested is incredibly disturbing.

> Furthermore the suggestion in the article that the "potential recruits" be arrested is incredibly disturbing.

And would probably further radicalize those targeted and those around them.

Not necessarily. Their mothers would probably be thankful.

Google's thing is 'tech', and they control the worlds biggest websites, so they're doing that _they_ can uniquely do. There are plenty of other people, organisations, and governments with money that can be spent on 'education'

This is so obviously the solution to the problem that it seems to be a conscious decision to propagate rather than eradicate terrorism. Bomb them into oblivion torture them and leave them in the durt. Yes this will make them love the west. Give them food, infrastructure, jobs, education? What?!?! That's crazy how could that ever help counter anti western propaganda? Just look at how easy it is to control 300 million fat lazy cable TV watching Americans. And how hard it is to control a handful of dirt poor ruined demoralized youths with no possible future (or the other way around). This pattern has played out over and over, so many times and so many places it's just a known fact. Yet we'll spend a billion dollars on bombs and bullshit and not a dime to redirect the generations who are ripe for terrorist recruiters

> emotional baggage due to family life, education, their personal measure of success in life

The emotional baggage is often due to none of that, but to an identity crisis and the search for a tribe to belong to.

> Attempting to shape information into one that fits a certain narrative is what gave birth to ISIS

Great comment. I think you are right, and in the same way this plan could do more harm than good

> and more importantly, free access to information.

Yeah, they should provide a search engine or something.

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