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In the midst of President Donald Trumps inauguration three years ago, well-groomed white supremacist spokesman and coiner of the term alt-right Richard Spencer was standing on a street corner explaining to a skeptical detractor that he is not a Nazi when an anonymous hero ran up and punched Spencer in the face.

Video of the incident went viral after it was shared on Twitter, and a still-ongoing debate between delighted leftists and scandalized centrists was born: Is it OK to punch a Nazi in the face? Naturally, the Jews got in on it, and things got positively Talmudic.

Earlier this month, the debate continued in the well-appointed conference room of a downtown San Francisco law firm during a lunchtime study session organized by Rabbi Dan Ain of Congregation Beth Sholom.

Ain brought to the Jan. 8 session copies of a study sheet titled Is One Permitted to Punch a White Supremacist in the Face? This collection of texts can be found on Sefaria, a free, user-friendly online compendium of any Jewish text you could want: Torah, Talmud, liturgy, Kabbalah and so on.

Click on a verse or passage and a sidebar appears, providing links to relevant classical commentaries, midrash, philosophical texts and more. Im not exaggerating when I say it is the most important Jewish resource on the internet.

Sefaria also provides a truly transformational tool: the ability to build and share source sheets. Users can build a clickable, printable collection of pieces of any text on Sefaria and add their own commentary. These sheets have become ubiquitous in Jewish study sessions; you may have already used one without knowing it. The source sheets can be made public so that anyone may look at them on Sefaria and add more texts.

Like the Talmud, the source sheet is a living, breathing document, with people adding and finding new sources as they go, Ain told the seven attendees.

The sheet on which Ain based the session was created three years ago by Rabbi Josh Bolton (currently at Hillel at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design), but people have continued adding relevant texts since then.

It begins with an excerpt from a 2005 post on jewschool.com, which recounts the story of an Orthodox rabbi who threw a cup of coffee at and then punched a belligerent anti-Semite who confronted him in an airport. Its never okay to throw the first punch unless yer schoolin a Nazi scumf*ck. Amen, the post concluded.

Our little gathering immediately got to dissecting the incident. Some held that the punch was unjustified, while others (myself included) felt that the Nazi scumf*ck had been asking for it by initiating the verbally aggressive encounter.

Asked the lawyer whose firm we met at: What does it accomplish?

To which I replied: It reinforces that there are consequences to bringing the Nazi scumf*cks hate into the public sphere.

Ains wife, writer Alana Joblin Ain, offered: It can boost morale. Maybe an individual act of resistance doesnt matter on its own, but it creates an atmosphere that leads to more action.

Said another attendee who had seemed on the fence at the beginning of the session, It wasnt out of the blue. It came after an exchange of hateful words. So I think its OK.

Asked another person: What was gained? Me: What was lost?

While one attendee was avidly anti-punch, most in the room were conflicted. I was the only person unequivocally on the side of punching Nazis.

As we talked, a record of the still-ongoing online discussion played out on the printout in front of us: Bolton discussing the texts with the Jews of the internet who were freely adding texts to his sheet.

A rabbi contributed a passage from Pirkei Avot 4:1: Who is the mighty one? He who overpowers his inclination slowness to anger is better than a mighty person.

When queried by Bolton, the rabbi explains: I think this text represents the stance of What I WANT to do is sock this guy in the face. But what Im GOING to do is respond nonviolently, protest, and elect officials that see to it that scumbags like him never become a legitimate threat.

An elderly Russian at the study session mentioned the example of Esther: She solved the problem peacefully, convinced the king to stop Haman. But that ended in the murder of Haman, Ain pointed out. She shrugged.

Then she said, What if Russia didnt stand up [during World War II]? Like Eastern Europe, we wouldnt have had peace.

But a Jew in the throes of text study can hold multiple opinions.

The woman then told the story of a Jewish boss she had at a Soviet-era factory. He once refused to shake the hand of an anti-Semitic Communist official. We never saw him again, she said. Was it worth it? Ain asked. No, she said. He didnt do any good for himself or anyone.

You cant make peace with someone who wants to kill you.

Throughout the session, Ain remained conflicted, acknowledging that true violence cant be countered by sitting on our hands but he also said, We are Beth Sholom beit shalom, a house of peace. How do we set the example of making peace? Is it impossible to dialog with these people?

To which I responded, You cant make peace with someone who wants to kill you. Consider the rodef law. Rodef means pursuer; in Jewish law, if someone is coming after you with the intention of killing you, you are required to attempt to kill them first.

As in so many Jewish debates, there was no resolution to be had, though I remained resolute in my convictions. Ain and I have continued the conversation in recent days over email and in person.

Beyond the subject matter, I was struck by the technology that facilitated it. Once upon a time, the Talmud was a real-life discussion. Then it was written down. Its distinctive style was standardized after the invention of the printing press, and a codified set of commentators was added to the margins of the pages.

Now, with tools like Sefaria, were dealing once again with a living Talmud.

Whether you agree or disagree with me about punching Nazis, you have to admit that Sefaria, with its unprecedented ease of access to Jewish text study and new tools for collaborative commentary, is good for the Jews.

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Is it permitted to punch a Nazi? Consult the internet Talmud. - The Jewish News of Northern California

It's 2020. Income inequality is rampant; anti-Semitism is on the rise; and a presidential candidate advocating social-democratic policies is at the top of the polls.

It's 1932.Income inequality is rampant; anti-Semitism is on the rise; and a presidential candidate advocating social-democratic policies is at the top of the polls.

It's difficult to ignore the parallels between today's America and that of the 1930s, especially in terms of radical politics. As the working class struggled to survive during the Great Depression, American leftists sought to fight back against the wealthy, while the capitalists, including men such as Henry Ford and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, courted fascism in order to maintain social control.

As Florida International University history professor Frank Luca and his America and Movies students found, today's battles between Republicans (and the so-called alt-right) and leftist politicians (and groups such as the DSA and Antifa) are not all that dissimilar from those in the '30s. But Luca and his students also found that each side had something in common back then: They used art to spread their messages.

"I think that's what the students were most interested in," Luca says. "They saw so many parallels from especially the 1930sbut also the little bit into the '40s and '50sof some of the same sort of controversies that are happening today between socialists on the left and the neo-Nazis, in this case, on the right."

Luca and his students' findings are the subject of the latest exhibit at the Wolfsonian-FIU: "Radicals and Reactionaries: Extremism in America," which is set to open Thursday, January 31, and run through the end of May. The class worked to curate a collection of book covers, posters, political cartoons, and other imagery from the era to explore its closeness with the present. Luca hopes that by analyzing these politically charged pictures, viewers will be able to make more educated decisions in our own image-saturated world.

This cover of a book published by the American League Against War and Fascism shows a caricature of the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. He was a known Nazi sympathizer.

Wolfsonian-FIU

"One of the things we always try to do here is to show people the artwork to also make them more aware of how they're being manipulated through the use of imagery," he says. "So if we can create more sophisticated consumers of that visual information, then perhaps people will be less manipulated in the present."

Though the students tried to balance the exhibition, ultimately they found more leftist material from which to choose. Luca says that's simply because artists as a group tend to lean left politically.

"Sometimes, when we were looking for coverage of a specific issue, we would find more radical left critique of the right for that issue than actual right-wing artistic propaganda," he says. "So it became a bit of a challenge to try to keep it balanced."

Though many leftist artists worked within institutions and went uncredited, some had name recognition. Artists presented in "Radicals and Reactionaries" include Lynd Ward, a pioneering illustrator and woodcut engraver who introduced the graphic novel to the United States in the form of his "wordless novel" God's Man. Ward also designed the cover for 10 Days That Shook the World, journalist John Reed's famous account of the Russian Revolution. Hugo Gellert, meanwhile, juggled staff artist jobs at theNew YorkerandNew York Timeswith work for the Communist Party USA, of which he was a committed member.

"His work tends to be lots of big, brawny men symbolizing the worker, and caricatures of any one of the sort of capitalist class almost looking like Mr. Moneybags from the Monopoly game," Luca says.

An unknown artist created this cover for a book about the Ku Klux Klan. Many of the artists who worked for far-right groups did so anonymously.

Wolfsonian-FIU

On the other side, many of the artists who produced work for right-wing groups did so anonymously, although that doesn't mean the works are inferior in quality. One piece on display is a cover for a book about the Ku Klux Klan depicting a white-hooded horseman framed by a leafy art nouveaustyle motif.

"It's presenting them as chivalric knights in armor. Defending white civilization and culture is the whole message, and it's very romanticized,"Luca says. "And so that's really the kind of thing that's more typical on the right."

Looking at this image, you might view the horseman as a heroic knight, or you might see the vines and imagine the Klan as a noxious weed infesting the nation. Or you might simply appreciate the aesthetics. What's important is knowing what the images mean and how they're meant to influence you.

"I'm not one of those people who would say there are good people on both sides," Luca says. "What we're really doing here is not entering the political fray, but showing how artists actually were willingly used [and] joined in the fray to fight for one cause or the other."

"Radicals and Reactionaries: Extremism in America." Thursday, January 30, through Sunday, May 31, at the Wolfsonian-FIU, 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach; wolfsonian.org.Admission is $12 for adults; $8 for students, seniors, and children aged 6 to 18; and free for members, children under 6, and students, faculty, and staff of the State University System of Florida.

Douglas Markowitz was Miami New Times' music and arts editorial intern for summer 2017. Born and raised in South Florida, he studied at Sophia University in Tokyo before finishing a bachelor's in communications from University of North Florida. He currently writes freelance about music, art, film, and other subjects.

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Things to Do in Miami: "Radicals and Reactionaries" at Wolfsonian-FIU January 30-May 30, 2020 - Miami New Times

Guest Writer x Jan 24, 2020

By Anuhya Bobba

An important yet overlooked scene of the 2004 movie, Iron Jawed Angels, was the disservice of Ida B. Wells (Adilah Barnes) at the hands of suffragette, Alice Paul (Hilary Swank), who asks Wells to march at the end of the Suffragette Parade of 1913 so as to not further divide the already hesitant political observers: We cant afford to lose their vote, explains Paul. Wells does not comply. In the film, Paul meets Wells protest with a smile. In reality, Paul deliberately marched separately from Wells.

Anti-Black racism becomes palatable when it is rendered fictitious in narratives like that of Iron Jawed Angels. The evil of anti-black racism is also subdued when it is asked to exist indefinitely for a greater cause like the white womans right to vote.

The Suffragette Movement as we know it, from inception to end, was a white (supremacist) feminist movement. White feminism, a derivative of the suffragette movement, is a feminism rooted in division. In the separation that the suffragette movement created from Black and Indigenous people, it also created the white female commitment to nationalism.

Tactics utilized by suffragettes attempted to convince male politicians and votes that white womens votes would serve the nation by complementing rather than challenging mens role the nation, here, is the white supremacist nationalist patriarchy.

White women banded with white men to form an exclusionary alliance, an alliance purported to serve the good of all women. White feminism, like white supremacy, co-opts history to ensure that it is remembered on the right side.

The backbone of white feminism is constituted by characteristics typically attributed to white women by white supremacy: innocence or purity. White feminism weaponizes these qualities, in any narrative that it furnishes of itself. White women can mean or do no harm because they define and represent a righteousness and a sanctity that other women, specifically Black women, must follow.

This righteousness, one that is posited as for the good of all women, is seen across the political history of this country well past the suffragette movement. The past and the present act as a witness to its fallacy.

The eugenics movement which (in the words of Theodore Roosevelt) feared that the children of immigrants and minorities would soon overtake the white, native-born population that predominantly sterilized Black people? White women, in the same movement, were considered Mother[s] of Tomorrow or middle class white womenconsidered to be the most mentally and physically sound, and therefore the most able to lead the advancement of civilizationto bear children and raise them with a particular set of conservative values, promoting the gendered status quo.

This attitude also resulted in decreased social security benefits for Black people, 65 percent of whom were considered ineligible for the Social Security Act of 1935.

After Brown v. Board of Education, it had been white women who acted as segregations constant gardeners indoctrinating young white men with KKK ideology.

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that had been reintroduced in 1971? White women mobilized to oppose it. In fact, it had been white women that shifted the Republican Party stance from a support of the ERA to a political party rooted in family values. The same white women further vied for limiting government welfare and social support which had already been prejudiced against Black persons.

Their fervent opposition to the ERA transformed to become a Pro-Family Movement, leveling policies that would curtail the right to abortion. Who are the most affected, when anti-abortion policies are implemented? People of color!

The same carefully constructed myth of white womanhoods innocence, purity, righteousness, and sanctity have acted as impressive shields against criticism and been used to portray white women as the leaders of feminist movements while they simultaneously sabotage any steps toward real liberation.

It is best seen in the 2016 election. Prior to it, the media consistently painted the Republican Party, Trump supporters, or the alt-right as angered white men. Yet, fifty-three percent of white women voted for Donald J. Trump. That statistic came as a shock to many, even though history has consistently acted as a testimony to the white female support of the white supremacist nationalist patriarchy.

In a similar way, celebrating 2020 as the 100th year anniversary of the Womens Right to Vote erases the pervasive racism that sustained the Suffragette Movement and its historical or present-day implications.

In her book, Aint I A Woman: Black Women And Feminism, bell hooks wrote, Southern white suffragists rallied around a platform that argued that [womens] suffrage in the South would strengthen white supremacy.

The Suffragette Movement worked hand in hand with white supremacy; it vied for the continued oppression of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in the United States. And, it has largely succeeded. White women have demonstrated time in and time out that if they are asked to choose an alliance with BIPOC or an alliance with whiteness, white women will opt for the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

If white feminist movements, like the Suffragette Movement, were remembered correctly as white supremacists invested in white nationalism, they would be viewed exactly as they are: an unhinged, open celebration of violence.

Every single dollar matters to usespecially now when media is under constant threat. Your support is essential and your generosity is why Wear Your Voice keeps going! You are a part of the resistance that is neededuplifting Black and brown feminists through your pledges is the direct community support that allows us to make more space for marginalized voices. For as little as $1 every month you can be a part of this journey with us. This platform is our way of making necessary and positive change, and together we can keep growing.

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White Feminists Built a Narrative of Innocence To Mask Their Racism - Wear Your Voice

It is a critic's job to have opinions. Like 'em or loathe 'em, a critic can't, in the end, sit on the fence - as the saying goes, you end up having splinters up your arse.

But in the increasingly polarised world we live in, expressing opinions can get you into seriously hot water. What we write isn't necessarily popular, especially when we're being critical (as we sometimes must be).

Laurence Fox appeared on Question Time earlier this week

At least we typically confine our opinions to the work in hand. But of course, art and the theatre don't exist in a bubble of their own: it reflects the world beyond it. But some celebrity actors can sometimes be accused of living in their own little bubbles of entitlement and/or grievance, as the actor Laurence Fox found out to his cost last week when he appeared on Question Time and ignited an unholy row about what exactly constitutes racism, when he insisted that it was him, in fact, who was the subject of racism when he dared to dispute an audience member's assertion to that Meghan Markle had been a victim of it, stating that Britain "is the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe", and "its so easy to throw the card of racism at everybody and its really starting to get boring now".

This may be the standard Donald Trump playbook, in which you project your own insecurities onto your opponent. When the audience member called him a white privileged male, he replied, "I cant help what I am, I was born like this, it was an immutable characteristic. To call me a white, privileged male is to be racist."

As Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote on Monday, "There is apparently money to be made by posh guys ventriloquising the so-called common man whether theyre slagging off vegans, Muslim women or climate protesters. In the future, everyone will bait liberals for 15 minutes. Fox is now in with the Spiked crew of provocateurs. Alt-left? Alt-right? Alt-dreary. There is a long line of these types, some cleverer than others: Rod Liddle, Richard Littlejohn and Jeremy Clarkson, with Toby Young, James Delingpole and Martin Daubney on the subs bench. They present as dissenting voices, speaking truth to the elite. In reality, they just preach to people their age. To call this circle jerk of intolerance a culture war is to ennoble it... What people are saying when they say racism doesnt exist is that it doesnt exist for them. Their own identities are weirdly defined by a form of victimhood they profess to hate. So envious are they of oppressed people that they try to claim that they are too, in the name of free speech."

But if Fox has, in turn, suffered a potential career death by a thousand (or even million) tweets, with even a branch of the actors union Equity (its minority ethnic members committee) initially censuring him before the general secretary withdrew the charge, he also attracted some defenders. In the Spectator,Douglas Murray - author of The Madness of Crowds, a public calling for what the Times headlined in their review of the book "free speech and nuance in an age of hysteria" -pointed out "As it happens, actors are quite often asked onto Question Time, where they sprinkle stardust and disappointment in equal measure. The disappointment comes from the fact that when actors speak in public with words that have not been written for them, they tend to demonstrate a number of mental deficiencies. One is their holding to the core fallacy, that some politicians such as Jess Phillips also tend to display, which is a belief that the problems of the world would be largely solved if other people were more like them." But Murray went on to applaud Fox: "Last week Laurence Fox did something unusual. He did not play the game that cynically or sincerely most actors and actresses play. He appeared, on live television, and appeared to think for himself."

But that's the last thing an actor should do, some fellow actors think, with Lily Allen declaring publicly that she was "sick to death of luvvies forcing their opinions on everybody else", especially when they never have to deal with what normal people have to deal with in his gated community. Stick to acting mate. Instead of ranting about things you don't know anything about".

In a round of follow-up appearances on other outlets, Fox doubled down on his sense of grievance about all things relating to race, complaining on James Delingpole's podcast that theres a Sikh in Sam Mendess film 1917: "It is kind of racist, if you talk about institutional racism, which is what everyone loves to go on about, which Im not a believer in, there is something institutionally racist about forcing diversity on people in that way." Hmmm.

As Marina Hyde wrote in another column in The Guardian, "When the contribution of Sikh soldiers to the first world war was later mentioned to him, he replied: 'I'm not a historian.' But luv: you dont NEED to be a historian. You honestly just need access to the website google.com. Because if you search the words 'Sikhs' and 'first world war', every single result from the very first one down will tell you how Sikh soldiers arrived on the Western front from 1914, how they were instrumental at Ypres, and so on for miles and miles. It literally couldnt be easier to find out about."

An actor at least needs to get their facts right if they're going to want to be a spokesperson for this kind of thing. Yet it is also a conversation worth having. And actors and writers can be a valuable part of it: as SaraBareilles, who takes over in her own show Waitress in the West End next week, has said in an interview in The Times today, "I happen to think that as artists we have extraordinary responsibility to be on the front line as much as we can, to be the amplifier for the voices that need hearing. But theres also a lot of ego in that, to be, like, Oh, I can be the spokesperson! Its a dance, so I think what I try to do is write songs about emotional material that really means something to me, on behalf of something thats bigger than me, and you just hope it lands and resonates with whoever needs it."

In other words, she lets her work speak for her. In the Times, it is pointed out that her song "Brave" has been adopted as an anthem for the LGBTQ+ community, and "A Safe Place to Land" advocates finding safe space for people in need.

But she also speaks proudly for the theatre community itself, telling the Times it "is just the most loving, open-armed, encouraging, diverse, beautiful group of humans. Were all on Team Theatre, trying to make Team Theatre have a voice, and have a life in the world."

I'll toast to that!

The eye of a cultural storm

There are other occasions, of course, where an actor finds themselves unwittingly in the eye of a cultural storm that unlike Fox they did not themselves create. Such was the case when producer Cameron Mackintosh sought to take Jonathan Pryce to Broadway to reprise his 1990 Olivier Award-winning performance as the Eurasian pimp called The Engineer in Miss Saigon. The 1991 transfer was nearly derailed when American Equity objected on behalf of its Asian members, suggested that one of them should be cast instead. Mackintosh in turn announced the show's cancellation, with a statement that declared, "Actors'Equity has refused to approve Jonathan Pryce to play the role of the Engineer in the Broadway production of Miss Saigon, as they cannot 'condone the casting of a Caucasian actor in the role of a Eurasian.' The creative team of Miss Saigon finds this position to be irresponsible, and a disturbing violation of the principles of artistic integrity and freedom. As a result, we are forced to announce the cancellation of next year's Broadway production of Miss Saigon. The debate is no longer about the casting of Miss Saigon, but the act of acting itself. because we feel so strongly about our own artistic position, we understand the depth of feeing within the Asian acting community and believe we share many of their aims. We passionately disapprove of stereotype casting, which is why we continue to champion freedom of artistic choice. Racial barriers can only undermine the very foundations of our profession."

In the end, the matter was resolved and Pryce did go on to play the role, but not without adjustments to the staging: unlike in London, he no longer wore prosthetics to alter the shape of his eyes and makeup to alter the colour of his skin.

But it also led to a sea-change in the way the role was cast afterwards, with only actors of -in the years since, they have cast the role only with actors of Asian heritage to play The Engineer, both on Broadway and on the United States tours. As Jon Jon Briones who had been in the original ensemble of the show and subsequently played the role in the most opening cast of the last London and Broadway revival of the show, commented to the New York Times: "I came from the Philippines, and we were used to yellowface, and how white actors play Asian roles, because we watched Hollywood movies all the time. We thought that was a normal thing."

In an interview in The Guardian this week, Jonathan Pryce recalled the controversy, commenting that he felt like the lightning rod for a wider cultural storm. "I mean, I was always confident that I wasnt portraying a stereotype. But all I could do was sit back and let other people have the argument. And I got support from very strange and unwanted quarters. Charlton Heston sent me a photo of him playing Fu Manchu. He signed it: From one yellowface to another. And I thought: Thats not what Im doing, Charlton. Thanks for your support.'"

He also acknowledged: "But thats the way change happens. It showed there was an inequality in the casting process. Its just tough when youre on the receiving end."

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Friday Briefing: Actors and artists as spokespeople and other cultural storms - LondonTheatre.co.uk

With the help of a $716,065 grant from the National Institute of Justice in 2016, professors from the University in collaboration with those at other colleges and the Federal Bureau of Investigation combined theory with science in their study of the radicalization of women by ISIL.

During a two-part project, Janet Warren, professor in the department of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences, aided by Gregory Saathoff, professor in the departments of public health science and emergency medicine and the FBIs conflict resolution specialist, developed a framework to describe this phenomenon based on accounts of western women who devoted their lives to committing acts of terrorism.

To test their model, Warren and Saathoff turned to founding director of the School of Data Science Donald Brown for help with gathering and analyzing relevant data. Mojtaba Heidarysafa, a doctoral candidate in the department of systems and information engineering, also joined the research project during the data collection phase, in which the team enrolled women ages 18 to 35 from the University and wider Charlottesville communities who volunteered for the study and were compensated for their involvement. Participants attended one of two sessions in which researchers recorded their emotional and physiological responses to propaganda.

As a result, a general pattern emerged regarding womens reactions to certain types of violent visual stimuli, confirming the possibility that a model could be created to show how women become radicalized. The researchers hope these findings could assist in preventing women from being recruited into terrorism.

Each woman completed a consent form reviewed by the University Institutional Review Board. Researchers provided women with the ability to discontinue their involvement in the study at any point and reimbursed them regardless of whether or not they completed the study. Furthermore, each participant had access to a tamer set of images, of which two women took advantage, as well as guidance after the study if she felt deeply affected.

Warren noted that similar studies often focus on men. But her consultant work with the FBIs counterterrorism efforts inspired her to consider the ramifications for women, Warren immediately considered the ramifications for women.

I thought it would be really interesting, as we were all together in these meetings talking about risk assessment and terrorism, for the first time to start a study on women, Warren said. Most research done on very violent crime is done on men I have often followed these huge areas of research and asked, How does this apply to women?

Saathoff collaborated with Warren to understand the overall trajectory of womens conversion to terrorism. He stressed the need to characterize the process not only as a means of pursuing criminals but also as a means to provide insights and strategies that could protect women from plots to recruit them.

In society we often learn through media anecdotes, and that is one way to become aware of these issues, but to truly understand the situation, its important to understand how this occurs in a large number of cases, Saathoff said.

First, Warren, Saathoff and their partners constructed a risk assessment model to outline the radicalization process. To successfully summarize and explain that transformation, the team hoped to find 300 women with sufficiently detailed court and investigation records but doubted the feasibility of that goal. When they uncovered almost five times as many women, researchers chose to analyze the 300 with the most robust court and investigative reports.

Over the next couple of years, Warren, Saathoff and their research team produced a risk assessment model that identifies not only aspects of a persons life that could increase the likelihood of her radicalization, but also preventative measures to proactively impede radicalization efforts. The hope was to generate a cohesive framework for analysis of potentially dangerous individuals for use in government agencies.

We were trying to do something that integrated what people in different countries were talking about, what we thought was interesting, what was in our academic research and make something that was more translational and international in terms of its broadness, Warren said.

The model incorporates the theory that risk and protective factors can be viewed as two ends of a spectrum. The factors in and of themselves are not diametrically opposed aspects of a persons life. Rather, their intensity and outlets determine someones likelihood to adhere to extremist beliefs.

Warrens three-stage framework pinpointed these elements. Beginning with the propensity for radicalization, individuals can transition to mobilization and eventually action and capacity for terrorist exploits. Key factors that dictate progression from state to state include morality, self-regulation, setting, physical activity and perception of alternatives.

Many women we have found who embrace this new identity are doing that because of unhappiness with their current situation, Saathoff said. Travel to another country is sometimes an escape, and its facilitated by those who would specifically tailor the message to the individual person Its remarkable how compelling and powerful that seduction can be.

Second, the team looked to Donald Brown, founding director of the School of Data Science, for help with gathering concrete evidence to support their theory, specifically as it relates to propaganda. Warren cited propaganda as a powerful recruitment tool that can persuade people to completely change their outlook. Though many studies dissecting the conscious reactions to materials disseminated by extremist organizations exist, Warren emphasized the lack of research on physiological indicators of emotional responses.

We actually know what people are thinking consciously, but weve got to try and grab some data about how theyre reacting unconsciously and see whats more powerful, or were never going to get a handle on [propaganda], Warren said.

According to Mojtaba Heidarysafa, doctoral candidate in the department of systems and information engineering who joined the research team for data collection, the initial phase of the data collection portion of the project consisted of 45 women probing the internet for content they believed could contribute to radicalization campaigns.

With the permission of the University Information Security Department and the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, researchers enabled women to investigate the dark web, a conglomeration of networks with restricted access that facilitate anonymous, illicit interactions. The U.S. National Security Agency reports that terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda utilize the dark web to maintain communication across their global network, as well as recruit new individuals to their cause.

We were also able to [connect] women and allow them to go into the dark web if that was something they were interested in doing, Warren said. The University was fantastic in giving us the freedom we needed to pursue this.

An additional 45 women who identified themselves as Muslim, non-Muslim conservative and non-Muslim liberal attended four sessions in which they viewed a series of images depicting extremist activities. During these sessions, researchers monitored eye gaze, pupil dilation, heart rate and galvanic skin response which tracks sweat gland activity to determine the arousal level and emotional state of participants.

While the first session contained neutral pictures of everyday objects to create a baseline for participant responses, subsequent sessions depicted white nationalist campaign posters and violent acts by jihadist, alt-right and alt-left groups.

We showed them all of these pictures, Heidarysafa said. When looking at hangings or beheadings, all of them had a non-neutral arousal response What we found was that no matter the background, there was a reaction.

In fact, Warren, Heidarysafa and Brown contributed to a pending publication that suggests pupil dilation and the aspects of images that attracted womens gaze were largely consistent across participants, regardless of their religious or political affiliations. In other words, the pictures play a larger role in individuals emotional response than certain major components of their identity. The authors of the study claim the commonalities point to patterns applicable to multiple cases of radicalization.

As this preliminary research project draws to a close, with a portion of the final papers and the results published in 2018 and 2019 and more to come in 2020, Warren said she and her colleagues already applied for an additional grant to expand their efforts and replicate the study with men. In doing so, Warren aims to take full advantage of the resources at the University to create materials useful for the FBIs observations of and interventions for at-risk individuals.

Usually academic researchers dont work with the FBI, and the FBI doesnt necessarily want to work with academic researchers, Warren said. The most important thing is the relationships exist so that we could do this research.

Originally posted here:
The psychology and physiology of propaganda: A study of the radicalization of women - University of Virginia The Cavalier Daily