Expert on radical murderers from Dresden: “No one hundred percent security”

FOCUS Online: Mr. Mücke, for 30 years you have been working with young people who have become radicalized or have committed criminal offenses. What has to happen for someone to become radicalized?

Thomas Mücke: For young people, they see certain needs met in the extremist offers. You are looking for recognition, you are looking for simple answers to difficult questions, you have conflicts with your family or friends. Extremists take advantage of this when someone feels they are not understood.

Do you have to be prone to radicalization?

Mücke: Before every radicalization there is a pain, in the extremist scene one tries to numb it. There is seldom an ideological pre-setting in advance, but rather certain conflicts in the life story. And the extremists are cleverly manipulative.

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How do the extremists proceed?

Mücke: Take the example of Islamism or Salafism: someone asks, do you want to get to know my brothers? You show a friendly face, distribute the Koran. Then the new person is invited to a conversation in the back room. Later, the so-called “true” Islam is introduced to him again, mostly the newcomers are very ignorant. And now they have to pass on the “true” Islam to others.

He is later isolated from family and friends. Another form of alienation occurs when the extremist tells the newbie that Islam and democracy do not go together. This is how extremists alienate a young person from society. At some point he only perceives the voices from his new milieu.

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How do you start in your work when someone has a radicalized worldview?

Mücke: I am practically the door opener and I make the person an offer, show an interest in the person. A radicalized person is initially very suspicious. And people in the extremist milieu no longer have their own way of thinking, they just follow an ideology and with me they learn to ask questions again. That changes the radicalization.

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Are men more prone to radicalization than women?

Mücke: I would deny that extremism is a male domain because female extremism is expressed differently. Women are less violent, but ISIS later recruited women as well. They do not attract attention through combative actions, but they act differently.

Now there were anti-Israel demos on Germany’s streets in the wake of the Middle East conflict. Was that to be expected?

Mücke: It hasn’t happened the first time. Whenever the Middle East conflict boils up, we have such anti-Semitic demonstrations. We have to acknowledge that anti-Semitism prevails in all population groups, we cannot put that into perspective. We have to talk to children about the topic, but that requires prevention work and a law promoting democracy, which was not passed. Because of our historical responsibility, we have to be particularly sensitive to the subject.

How can you counteract this?

Mücke: Often it is a question of resources. It would be helpful, for example, if schools to call in external experts on the subject of the Middle East conflict, which is a very emotional issue.

Where does this hatred come from?

Mücke: As always, there are two perspectives, the Israeli and the Palestinian. We have to treat each other with respect in Germany. There are many approaches that can make a difference. For example, we offer workshops and training courses in which tandems between Jews and Muslims work together. That always makes a big impression on young people. That is why prevention work is so important.

The ISIS terrorist Abdullah AHH was sentenced to life imprisonment for the attack on a homosexual couple in Dresden. They had talked to him before the crime. Would you have had to do something differently in retrospect?

Mücke: There are cases in which we notice that something is wrong, the person seems opaque. We knew that he was a risk person, he was classified as a dangerous person. However, the deradicalization work had not yet taken place with him.

After the fact, we looked very carefully to see if we had missed anything, we went through every conversation again. Unfortunately, we have not been able to read that something like this could be imminent. That is of course very depressing. We have to realize that there is no such thing as one hundred percent security. He already had the script in his head and nobody saw it coming. If he had threatened someone beforehand or had expressed his hatred of western society to us, all the alarm bells would have gone off. But that was not the case.

Do you think people can change?

Mücke: I can’t always make an impact on everyone, but on most of them. Because if we don’t approach people, we give them up, and the extremists do it.

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