On the SITE (or SITE Intelligence Group) blog, a group that tracks radical Islamic websites and other traffic, I found an article on Mr. McCain’s Twitter activity over the last few years. It quoted tweets and included some screenshots of them from December 2010 – January 2013. It had some observations I found interesting. Two quotes pertain here. Namely:
Notably, though, activity on his Twitter account spanning from December 2012 to January 2013 indicates his radicalization likely happened much later in his life.
And:
When exactly McCain left for Syria to fight with IS was never indicated on his Twitter. However, the year-and-a-half-long gap between his casual tweets in January 2013 and his returning May 14, 2014 tweet—in which he endorses IS and claims that “we will soon be 1″—may indicate a span of time in which McCain became radicalized and immigrated to Syria.
What is “radicalization”?
Wikipedia’s entry on “radicalization” is a good place to start in it’s completeness and depth:
Radicalization (or radicalisation) is a process by which an individual or group comes to adopt increasingly extreme political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that (1) reject or undermine the status quo[1] or (2) reject and/or undermine contemporary ideas and expressions of freedom of choice. For example, radicalism can originate from a broad social consensus against progressive changes in society. Radicalization can be both violent and nonviolent, although most academic literature focuses on radicalization into violent extremism (RVE).[2] There are multiple pathways that constitute the process of radicalization, which can be independent but are usually mutually reinforcing.[3][4]
I may have been radicalized in most people’s eyes. I became interested in Marx in my undergrad years, reading websites and books while taking sociology classes, all the whilst thinking a utopian world could be won by the proletariat. I’m not saying that it will never happen, but as my academic journey continued into grad school, I became, as am now, a Democratic Socialist.
Now Democratic Socialists are considered of the far/radical left while Mr. McCain subscribed to a perverted form of Islam with violence as morals, value, and custom. Rather, I believe that substantial social/economic change should be accomplished through democratic measures. Are we the same? No.
Keep this all in mind when contemplating issues of “radicalization” and before putting a negative tinge to it.
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