the Taliban<\/a> in Quetta, near the Afghan border, then provided a further catalyst, pushing him toward Salafism, an ultraconservative, fundamentalist reform movement within Sunni Islam.<\/p>\nThe meeting took place when he was only 19 years old, in 1995, a year before the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, meaning Shaikh was unaware of the brutally repressive policies the group would later impose, and reports of any violence until that point could be explained away as \u201cpropaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n
The chance meeting left him \u201cenamored\u201d with the group. It gave him the religious identity he sought, a sense of masculinity, and a feeling of belonging to something greater than himself. \u201cIt gave me that new identity that I thought I needed,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n
After returning to Canada, he became close to several Salafi fundamentalists, though his enthusiasm for the movement waned after he married, had a child, and took on other responsibilities.<\/p>\n
His new wife, a convert to Islam, exposed him to the treatment of Muslim women during the couple\u2019s trip to India, forcing him to confront the gap between his own Western assumptions about gender roles and the ideals he had once associated with Taliban members he had previously admired.<\/p>\n
An ideology less easy to detach from was antisemitism, though he said that it was easier for him as an Indian Muslim not bound by Arab nationalism.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like you\u2019re taught that you\u2019re supposed to subscribe to these views, and then you kind of practice it in your head, maybe on the street….<\/p>\n
\u201cThe most I got to was I\u2019d see a synagogue and [have feelings of] dislike [toward it]; hostility is what\u2019s evoked…. I saw the synagogue, and I was like, \u2018Oh man, I wish I could blow up the synagogue right now,\u2019\u201d he explained, quickly adding that he never had any real intention of attacking the Jewish community but felt the views were something he needed to practice.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was peripheral, but it still makes up the larger narrative, if you will. You\u2019re against the West; you\u2019re against the Jews. The Jews are seen as an extension of the West. It\u2019s the same things that animate all these anti-Israel and anti-Jewish protests,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n
His time following Salafi Islam, which had already waned, came to a hard stop in the year that preceded the famous \u201cToronto 18\u201d case.<\/p>\n
The case involved a group of 14 adults and four youths who were arrested in June 2006 for a foiled homegrown terrorist plot inspired by al-Qaeda.<\/p>\n
The 18 individuals had planned to carry out large-scale attacks, including bombings of the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Parliament of Canada, and the beheading of government officials.<\/p>\n
Just after returning from Syria in 2004, Shaikh saw a news report on Mohammad Momin Khawaja\u2019s involvement in the UK fertilizer bomb plot, where a group of terrorists collected 1,300 lbs. of ammonium nitrate for the purpose of creating high casualty events in and around London.<\/p>\n
Shaikh recruited by Canadian Security Intelligence<\/p>\n
Having recognized Khawaja from his own extremist days, Shaikh contacted the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which went on to recruit him as an undercover operative, beginning his career in counterterrorism.<\/p>\n
Now, rather than identifying terrorists, Shaikh spends his days trying to stop young people from crossing that line.<\/p>\n
Referencing Randy Borum\u2019s theory of radicalization, Shaikh explained that there are steps that precede a person\u2019s transition from violent rhetoric to violence.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018It\u2019s not right, it\u2019s not fair, it\u2019s your fault, you\u2019re evil\u2019 \u2013 that\u2019s the progression into violence, because you have to dehumanize, you have to attribute evil, you have to attribute something greater to what the adversary is doing, for you to justify taking actions which normally you would not take,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n
The actions of the in-group are minimized, while the actions of the out-group are amplified, as part of this process of justifying violence, he continued.<\/p>\n
Shaikh\u2019s understanding of the radicalization process has helped numerous youths step back from the edge, even if not fully abandon ideologies some might not agree with. He has used it to counter support for Hamas, noting that, as an Islamic movement, many of its actions cannot be justified even if Israel were committing crimes against the Palestinian people.<\/p>\n
\u201cI show the statement of the Prophet, peace be upon him, when he says, \u2018Don\u2019t kill the elderly. Don\u2019t kill women. Don\u2019t kill children. Don\u2019t mutilate the bodies of the enemy.\u2019 These were all things that they violated openly. So, Islamically it cannot be justified,\u201d he said. \u201cI tell them this is why God will never give you [the] victory that you desire, when you break his commandments, when you break his laws, especially the laws of war. How are you going to get any victory from that?\u201d<\/p>\n
Though many have attempted to sidestep this line of argument with whataboutism, Shaikh maintains that the \u201cends justify the means\u201d mentality is un-Islamic, and justifying Hamas\u2019s rapes, abductions, and murders is the same as \u201csaying \u2018Bism-illah\u2019 over pork.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shaikh aims to prevent youth from losing themselves in extremism<\/p>\n
Shaikh\u2019s goal is not to make a Zionist out of a radically anti-Israel youth. His goal is to stop young people from destroying lives, including their own, by losing their sense of self to a cause. More often than not, that means filling a gap that\u2019s missing in their lives or creating a sense of perspective.<\/p>\n
Parents for Peace doesn\u2019t tell young people to give up protests, he explained; it reminds young people that their parents are pouring their hard-earned money into institutions so they can get a degree, obtain a good job, and have a comfortable life.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re making it practical for them,\u201d Shaikh explained. \u201cIt\u2019s not a moral debate that we\u2019re having, whether this is acceptable or you should love Israel; we don\u2019t do any of that.\u201d<\/p>\n
When they have a family to support, when they enter the real world, \u201cthe grace of God\u201d will not pay their bills, and they can\u2019t afford to lose stable employment over a belief system, he said, adding that he uses his own story to highlight how growing up can mean abandoning these extreme notions of the world.<\/p>\n
Kasim Hafeez’s own experience as a second-generation Pakistani Muslim further evidences much of Shaikh\u2019s understanding of what can push someone to make the jump into extremism.<\/p>\n
Hafeez was once a radicalized student with a deeply embedded hatred of Jews and plans to travel to Pakistan to enroll in a LeT terrorist training center. Now, he works for Christians United for Israel as a Middle East analyst and is a vocal advocate for Israel.<\/p>\n
Born and raised in Nottingham, Hafeez was British in every formal sense. He held only a British passport and attended a state school in the UK.<\/p>\n
Yet he grew up in a close-knit, insular community where traditions were carefully preserved, mosques served as the focal point of daily life, and many parents lived with the constant fear that their move to Britain would lead their children to abandon both Islam and the Pakistani culture they had brought with them.<\/p>\n
White nationalists would also frequently make clear that he and his family were not welcome and he would never truly be considered English, he explained, recalling incidents of street abuse when he was as young as five.<\/p>\n
Though he recalled antisemitism being a standard sentiment in his household and community, Hafeez denied that his parents and grandparents had been radical. As members of the first generation of migrants who came to the UK after World War II, they had personally witnessed the true cost of Islamic extremism and were uninterested in bringing such sentiments with them.<\/p>\n
The second generation, born in Britain but not truly considered British by many, did not have such an understanding.<\/p>\n
\u201cTorn between these two identities,\u201d Hafeez explained, many Muslims in his generation felt lost.<\/p>\n
He explained that the deprivation often associated with the unskilled labor jobs many migrants take on in their new countries can foster feelings of anger, victimhood, and hopelessness.<\/p>\n
These emotions, he suggested, often require only a small spark to erupt. In this case, that spark came with the 1988-1989 protests and book burnings surrounding Salman Rushdie\u2019s The Satanic Verses.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe that really opened the door to the level of radicalization we now have, because it opened this idea that Muslims in the West don\u2019t really belong here; that there are their values and our values,\u201d he said, highlighting in particular the fact that blasphemy is forbidden in Pakistan, and that living in the West means hearing views one may find offensive to their very core.<\/p>\n
Hafeez explained that for second-generation Muslims in the West, the Soviet Union\u2019s failure in 1989 became a source of pride, making mujahideen (those engaged in Islamic jihad) seem \u201clike heroes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eager to capitalize on this anger and wave of hero worship were groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun. Though the latter was first formed in Britain, Hafeez maintained that the terrorist recruitment was largely coming from sources external to his own community.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re growing up; you\u2019re feeling that you\u2019re being deprived of something; you know that you\u2019re different from the society around you, which you don\u2019t really fit into; and now you\u2019re a victim of that society, but you\u2019re a victim of something that there is nothing you can do about it, like if the whole Western society is against you,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s nothing you can do about it, other than be angry, be frustrated, be depressed, and it creates this circle of hopelessness, which makes the message of these groups a lot more appealing.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s giving you a belonging; it\u2019s giving you kind of a way to address it, but not really; and it also then takes you down this path of \u2018this is the way forward,\u2019 and you start making these leaps of taking your situation and then identifying it with that of other Muslims and drawing these other parallels that may not exist, and unfortunately it\u2019s very easy to fall into.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jump to extremism often helped by exposure to antisemitism<\/p>\n
That jump is often aided by the background antisemitism Muslim youth are exposed to from birth, he continued. Hafeez shared that, though they are largely nonsensical in retrospect, antisemitic explanations for his position in the world had once provided a sense of clarity.<\/p>\n
\u201cPakistan has never had a significant Jewish population post-partition, and so this obsession with Israel is kind of weird. Obviously, they\u2019re just drawing it from the wider Arab world, etc. But it was really common… like day-to-day.<\/p>\n
\u201c[The Nottingham community was] not a radical community, not an extremist community; like, no one is trying to implement Sharia law or overthrow the government, or even talking about that.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut antisemitism was super common, like calling somebody a Jew as an insult, [saying] the Jews control America and the media,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou take it on without even realizing. When you hear it day after day, it\u2019s just normal conversation. It doesn\u2019t become an opinion or like a crazy conspiracy theory. It just became a fact because I didn\u2019t know anyone Jewish. I had never spoken to anybody Jewish in my life, so those narratives became the reality.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo when you have, years later in life, a well-organized group of people who are now touching on to other parts that you\u2019re looking for in your life, and then drawing the connection that all the negatives are because of the Jews, it kind of makes sense.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was just such a level of anger and hatred toward this one group because I see them as responsible for all the ills happening in the Muslim world,\u201d Hafeez shared, adding that he has struggled to come to terms with the guilt of knowing he once perpetuated the same type of prejudice he had suffered as a minority.<\/p>\n
Naturally, Hafeez\u2019s views only became more radical at university, as he was regularly handed flyers of limbless children alleged to be Palestinian victims of Israel. It was here that the active dehumanization of Israelis started, and after a trip to Pakistan in 2000, he began to think about joining LeT.<\/p>\n
Pro-Palestinian sentiments often begin from a place of genuine humanitarian concern and are capitalized upon by extremist groups. As Dahri explained, \u201cExtremist rhetoric can become normalized when it is presented in emotionally persuasive humanitarian or political terms, because people may respond to the moral framing rather than recognize the underlying extremism.<\/p>\n
\u201cNewly established Islamist regimes can use this approach to portray themselves to the global Muslim community as nonviolent and consistent with Islamic teachings, while justifying past armed struggle as a response to unjust Western policies toward Muslims. Through humanitarian activity and claims of justice, they seek to present themselves as peaceful, benevolent, and motivated by service rather than self-interest.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like many young people, Hafeez viewed the world through a rigid set of binaries. Jews were bad. Israel was evil. Muslims were victims. Islamic jihad was a natural response to the West\u2019s perceived injustices. That worldview began to unravel when he came across Alan Dershowitz\u2019s The Case for Israel.<\/p>\n
He came across the book in the chain bookstore Waterstones, drawn by its bold blue Star of David on the cover. At first, he scoffed at it, dismissing it as Jewish propaganda, and picked it up believing he could easily refute all of Dershowitz\u2019s arguments. He couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe way I was approaching faith at that point was very dogmatically; everything needed a source… but what Dershowitz\u2019s book did was it created doubt. I didn\u2019t read this one book and was like \u2018well, I got it wrong; who knew?\u2019\u201d he recounted. \u201cIt just doesn\u2019t work like that, and I initially set off to prove it wrong. I started looking outside of my own echo chamber, outside of leaflets from Friends of Al-Aqsa, and I was getting a very different picture of things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even attempting to spend time refuting the facts laid out in the book was \u201cisolating,\u201d as members of his community urged him to accept the information he had been taught as fact and leave it at that.<\/p>\n
Plagued with the idea that \u201call this anger and venom and energy\u201d he had put into his antisemitic belief system could be wrong, his entire worldview could be wrong, he decided the only option was to visit Israel and discover the truth firsthand in 2007.<\/p>\n
With little experience traveling alone, Hafeez followed UK travel guidance to the letter and answered every question truthfully when he arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport.<\/p>\n
His candid admission that he disliked Jews and Israel and had come to see whether the country was as evil as he had been taught led to an eight-hour interrogation. He was ultimately released, however, and allowed to explore the country for himself.<\/p>\n
\u201cEight hours was a long time, but it wasn\u2019t a bad experience, and that was the first time I\u2019d spoken to an Israeli,\u201d he commented.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I look back, I think what it was about Israel [that changed my view] was just the normality of it. It was not like anything I expected, and just being able to walk around, speak to random people, just the humanizing effect of that, was incredibly powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n
The trip proved to be a turning point for Hafeez, who began dedicating serious time to understanding the other side of a conflict he had heard about for much of his life. He visited museums, read books by Jewish and Zionist authors, and immersed himself in research, hoping to bring that knowledge back to his own community, a community that was less than receptive.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was just talking to friends and family, like, \u2018Hey, I went, and this is my experience.\u2019 I didn\u2019t expect the backlash that I got. Maybe I was naive, maybe stupid,\u201d he shared.<\/p>\n
Though Hafeez never denounced Islam or insulted God in any way, he was treated as if he had committed an act of blasphemy. He received death threats, was thrown out of his mother\u2019s home, and was repeatedly accused of being funded by Jerusalem.<\/p>\n
\u201cI get death threats all the time on social media, and I\u2019m like, \u2018You can\u2019t even spell properly; I\u2019m not that worried.\u2019 But it\u2019s always a little disconcerting when you start getting death threats left at your actual front door. That\u2019s a little like \u2018this is not fun,\u2019\u201d Hafeez opened up, seemingly covering up a very painful period of his life with British humor.<\/p>\n
After he submitted an article to The Jewish Chronicle, he was invited to give speeches across the country, and his relationship with his family further deteriorated.<\/p>\n
Asked why he would endure all of that, including the familial ties that never fully recovered, Hafeez answered that there were two main reasons.<\/p>\n
Firstly, he felt a tremendous weight of guilt at the hate he had put out into the world, the hate he had himself experienced.<\/p>\n
Secondly, he hoped that sharing the information could save other Muslims from living a \u201chorrible\u201d life where everything is \u201cclouded by anger.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just not a pleasant way to live mentally or in any way, and then you end up going down a really dangerous path, and I just thought, if speaking out can prevent one person from going down that path, then it\u2019s worth it,\u201d he shared.<\/p>\n
Concluding the interview, Hafeez said he found it particularly difficult to accept the type of extremism being embraced by white young people, who will be largely untouched by the consequences it breeds.<\/p>\n
\u201cI see middle-class white people who are like \u2018Free Palestine\u2019 and all in, [and] it\u2019s like, yeah, you can say this and go home. It\u2019s not your community that the real hardcore extremists are targeting. It\u2019s not your community that the actual jihadist groups are targeting to pull your kids, your cousins, or your nephews away into much deeper and darker things.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then, when those things come to a terrible conclusion, when there\u2019s a terrorist attack, it\u2019s not your community that has to deal with the blowback of it,\u201d he stated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2025, deaths from terrorist attacks fell by 28%, and the number of global incidents declined by 22%,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":502508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[111,29537,70646,51,42,64917,10928,103898,43,90143,19225,98,58,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-502507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-antisemitism","tag-counterterrorism","tag-extremism","tag-hamas","tag-headlines","tag-isis","tag-islamic-jihad","tag-islamism","tag-news","tag-radicalization","tag-taliban","tag-terrorism","tag-the-october-7-massacre","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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Banners and Palestinian flags are displayed as people attend an anti-Israel protest amid the Israel-Hamas war, in Paris, France July 31, 2025. (credit: REUTERS\/TOM NICHOLSON)Former counterterrorism operative explains what draws youth to extremism<\/p>\n