The Collapse of the Caliphate

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Collapse of the Caliphate

"‘The police and social services struggled to see young women who were out drinking, taking drugs and having sex as children... because they were behaving in ways that we associate with adulthood. They are still children, even if you scan their brains, you would see massive differences in the brain cortex between the ages of 15 and 25’...

‘Only last week, young people were out demonstrating on climate change. And everybody tells me we had to listen to them, because they had more wisdom with this campaign for votes for 16 year olds. And my concern here is that what you're basically saying is that young people, and you've noticed that until the age of 25 the brain changes, you can never be held to account for anything. I mean, how are they ever going to grow up? Are all ISIS members brainwashed, in which case send them all on a rehabilitation course.’…

‘I think there's a US academic launch Lawrence Steinberg who worked on the use of the death penalty for people under 18 in the US. And his study showed that although young people's brains are of course, developing, what they lack usually is what we might call the brake.

So they usually are more likely to be violent, to not think through their decisions, to not think through consequences and to behave impulsively. In all of those cases, that doesn't mean we can't take young people seriously at all. I think it just means that when they make decisions, they might be making bad decisions with very serious consequences that they hadn't really thought through properly. That's why we have mitigating circumstances. That's why judges take into account young people's behavior in courts differently than they do adults.’...

‘I suppose there are two ways of looking at these people. They're either psychopaths or they’re theologians’...

‘I think they're neither. And both. The World Bank did a survey… in Iraq and Syria about a year and a half ago, and they found that the overwhelming majority of them had a better social standing and a better education than the national average in the countries that they come from.

Let's not forget that the current leader of Al-Qaeda *something* is a surgeon, bin Laden was a an engineer, etc, etc. This is an ideological position that people take to join groups like ISIS, and anybody and everybody can be vulnerable, inverted commas.

I remember going to prison one time with a leading Imam and we went to do a presentation and he was asked to go and speak to somebody who was a convicted terrorist. He went in the same color as me, and he came out very, very pale. And I asked him, what's the matter? And he turned to me and said, the guy's got a point. He went in with these theological position and claims that he won the theological argument, but the guy hit him with the intellectual, the ideological, the social and the emotional, and the Imam had nothing. It's a combination of both of those and much more‘...

'What does the war on terror, what does our foreign policy got to do with European Muslims including Brits flying thousands of miles to go and kill other Muslims and take Yazidi sex slaves. That's a red herring… nobody travels all that way to kill other Muslims because of something that our government might do'...

‘The first witness’s argument was that she was young and not a fully developed human, and so on. But she went even further than that didn't she? That no one really is either a victim or a perpetrator she said at one stage’

‘I think that's really dangerous, because then actually, what you're doing is making nobody morally or legally culpable for anything... Extremism isn't actually just on the margins. It's actually mainstream, within families or some families’"


Shamima Begum was too young at 15 to be responsible for joining ISIS. Kids are old enough at 8 to take hormone blockers and start gender transition

Interestingly, this Imam doesn't believe that jihadists have a corrupted view of Islam