Over the years I’ve noticed a marked similarity with the sorts of statements put out by the families of British Muslims when their offspring or relatives are caught planning or have been killed during, an Islamic terror attack. These statements often contain the phrases, ‘he was radicalised by the internet’, or ‘we didn’t know he was going to do jihad’ or ‘we had no idea he was radicalised’. Of course, some of these family members may be telling the truth and some may be dishing out the usual lies in order to protect their memory of the relative from taint and also to protect the ideology of Islam. We can never know the truth of course but it is wise to note that a lot of relatives of jihadis claim to not know much of what is going on.

There’s a mixture of this ‘same old same old’ excuse making but also a recognition that radicalisation has occurred from the mother of the Sreatham jihad atacker who was shot dead by armed police. Her press statement carried by Sky News makes for interesting reading and I have to say that it must be terrible for a parent, no matter who they are, to lose a child to political or religious extremism or to any sort of cult. I have read enough accounts of parents whose children have joined cults to understand some of the helplessness that parents feel to see their children throwing their lives away on worthless endeavours like cult membership or some form of extremism. Maybe this applies in this case, who knows?

Sky said:

The mother of Streatham terrorist Sudesh Amman has told Sky News he was a “nice, polite boy” who was radicalised online and in prison – and revealed she spoke to him just hours before the attack.

Haleema Faraz Khan said her son seemed “normal” when she visited him at a bail hostel on Thursday and he called her before Sunday’s attack asking her to make him some mutton biryani.

Amman might have been nice and polite when he was younger and I admit that it is indeed dificult to reconcile the images of the happy looking child and the murderous terrorist that this child eventually became. However something changed Amman and that something may be much more closer to home than the prisons and online communities that Mrs Khan blames for her son’s descent into radicalisation and to his ultimate destruction.

It was not the internet and not only the prison radicalisation that is an issue here, it is the core ideologies of Islam. It was an ideology of extreme violence, a multitude of out group hatreds and an over emphasis in Islamic scripture on the afterlife, that led Amman on this deadly path.

I suspect that Amman’s family may be, like many other Muslim families that I’ve encountered, who are not especially religious, try to live their lives by guidance of the few nice bits in Islamic scripture that exist and indeed know very little when it comes to the detail of Islamic scriptural texts. If that is the case and the family know little about Islam in its more gory details, they may not have been all that concerned about about him becoming ‘more religious’. They may have seen this increase in piousness in the same way I see my son wanting to give tzdakah/charity to ‘the sick babies’ (his chosen local charity), which is as evidence of him taking a step towards learning to be a good person.

Whilst I have no doubt that there are many families of jihadis who lie to the press about what they know or might have suspected about a relative exposed as being involved in terrorism, in this case I’m picking up the disinct odour of naivety from Amman’s family. Mrs Khan stated that she didn’t notice anything abnormal about her son when she visited him at his bail hostel prior to the terror attack. She may not have been aware that for terrorists to be able to successfully carry out an attack then there must be no forewarning, not even an incident of incautious or out of character words, which could give those outside of the circle of plotters an inkling of what may really be going on. Someone dedicated to killing for Allah, as Amman plainly was, would not baulk at decieving their parents, friends or spouses in order to hide a particular terror plot. The fact that Amman seemed normal and even gave the impression of looking to the future, could all have been an act.

Whilst believing that Amman’s family may have been naive about Amman’s actions and path I have to take issue with some of what Mrs Khan said. She has claimed to Sky News that her son became ‘more religious’ when he came out of Belmarsh high security prison. The problem with this statement is that he had been radicalised before going into prison as he had been sentenced to over three years for distributing ISIS/jihadist propaganda. Of course I accept that this savage had been enamoured by online content of a jihadist nature but this content alone does not account for this man becoming radicalised to the extent that he carried out a terror attack.

In the course of writing this blog I have to do a lot of research and in the course of that research I see and read a lot of truly awful stuff, which includes jihadist, neo-Nazi, Far Left and other sorts of propaganda. None of it ‘radicalises’ me, on the contrary, it shows me why extremism is of itself bad. However this content is alleged to have radicalised Amman and we should ask why?

Was Amman as an individual, particularly suggustible? Did he have the sort of personality that could be easily dominated and influenced? Was he genuinely mentally ill or suffering from some sort of learning difficulty that might have made him obey orders that any normal person would have seen as wrong, orders to commit mass terror for example? All of these factors may have had an influence on the path that Amman took, but another factor is that unlike with non-Muslims, Jihadism had in Amman’s Islamic upbringing, already had a field fertilized and prepared for it. The ISIS propaganda was the key that fitted the Islamic theological and cultural lock that Amman already possessed. I doubt it was just online propaganda that influenced Amman. I would be completely unsurprised to find it revealed somewhere down the road that Amman had had physical contact with other radical Muslims outside of an online environment. I believe this as it would be unlikely for someone to knowingly go down the path that he took just by internet influence alone (unless he’s one of the gormless ‘Tide Pod Eating’ generation of jihadis). Someone somewhere in the early stages of Amman’s radicalisaiton, before he went to prison, may have had a guiding hand on Amman’s shoulder.

There is possibly much more to this story of the Streatham jihadi than has come out so far. What I can say is that there is the strong possiblity that this family may have known their son and indeed their own religion, less than they maybe should have had. If they had been more aware of who he was associating with both online and offline,yes I know that this is difficult with an over 18, they might have known earlier that he was disappearing into the bowels of a death cult. If the family had possibly been more aware of the more nasty bits of Islam that Amman was being pushed towards and becoming enamoured with, then they might have been warned about the path he was taking and maybe he might have been diverted from that path.

There are too many Muslim families who say that they knew nothing of how their child/brother/uncle/parent became a jihadi. Now assuming that they are telling the truth and not just bullshitting the kuffar, this means that many Muslim families may be unaware of the theology of their own faith and are not aware of the key passages in Islamic scripture used by jihadists to get recruits. A major flaw as I see it in Islam is that unlike in Protestant Christianity and in Judaism, where adherents are encouraged to read and understand the Bible/Tanakh, Muslims too often rely on interpretations by scholars which come with their own biases (the issue of scholastic bias is also a part of other rule based religions such as Judaism, I can go to five different Rabbonim with a question and get five subtly different answers). It’s all too easy for Western Muslims to be cultural Muslims and understand very little about the parts of Islamic scripture that the jihadists use to influence people like Amman. Therefore, because families may not be aware of key texts used to brainwash people, they cannot really fight against this brainwashing.

Of course, I would myself be naive if I did not accept that in some Islamic families, jihad is indeed a family affair. There are Islamic families who have members who are engaged in various forms of jihad and who do so in the full knowledge and support of their family. However I believe that there may be other families who may be at a total loss as to why their offspring is supporting Jihad. These families may not realise that the Islam with a moderate veneer that they may have been brought up with and how they may have brought their own children up, is just a thin carapace of reasonableness covering over what is in truth an awful death cult.

Maybe if the more decent people of Muslim heritage and practise, and such individuals do exist, knew more about the texts that the jihadis were using to snare their sons and daughters, then maybe the jihad recruiters could be countered more effectively? Maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree here but I’ve met enough Muslim indiviudals who are decent not because of Islam’s precepts, but in spite of them to know how out of their depth they would be if one of their kids went radical. It is these the ‘Ordinary Joe Mohammed’ families which I call them who are likely to have their children targeted by groups like ISIS for radicalisaton. Because these families may not have enough knowledge of Islam to counter the seemingly limitless knowledge of the jihad recruiters, they stand little chance of getting their kids away from the radicals.

Do I think that those who commit Islamic terror offences should be imprisoned for a long time and preferably deported? Of course I do. Send the families with them if they are complicit in jihad. Justice and security would demand no other response.

However, for the same reason why I dislike vigilantism, I also dislike lumping the radical Muslim in with the secular Muslim. This is because just as vigilante gangs can make bad choices of targets and often create an injustice for the innocent, those Muslims who have nothing to do with radicalisation or those who are fighting it, should not pay a price that should be paid by those who have encouraged radicalism or who have set people on a path to terrorism or who have committed terrorism themselves.

Now I have no love for Islam, in fact I despise it as an ideology because of the damage that it does to people both inside and outside of Islam. I despise it with a similar passion to that which I have for my hatred for the other megadeath ideologies that have troubled this unhappy world throughout the centuries, most starkly in a 20^th century dominated by the twin evils of Communism and Fascism. But despite my loathing for Islam the ideology and for that it and government pandering to it has done to my countries, I do not feel that it is right to harm innocent Muslims who have nothing to do with radicalism. What I do believe is that some Muslim families, especially the secular sort and those who are the Islamic equivalent of the ‘twice a year Jew’, are ill equipped to handle the situation that blows up (sometimes literally) when a member of their family is being or has been targetted for radicalisation.

Giving families the tools that they need to counter the blandishments of those radicalising their children may, in the long run, be more cost effective than cleaning up the corpses caused by their almost inevitable descent into murderous jihadist madness. The British Islamic community is producing an alarming number of jihadis and if we can equip Muslims with tools to counter the influence of the jihadi leaders, then we may be able to stop radicalisation before the point when deradicalisation would become useless. Such a policy might have other benefits too. If more secular Joe Mohammed’s knew just how bad Islam really us under the tolerant carapace that might have been part of their upbringing, then even more Muslims than do so already may embark on the long journey of questioning that will eventually allow them to turn away from Islam in disgust. Trying this approach may or may not be effective, but I think that it would be worth a try.